d’Arte Board

If you’re a loyal d’Arte Board reader you may very well recognize the name Sarah Bliss from previous posts… ayep. Sarah is a fellow Western Mass artist who, you may recall, recently exhibited at the most fabulous Wunderarts Gallery in Amherst, MA. Sarah’s art ranges from lush painterliness to solid objectness, often within one piece. Her recent work is a complex and thoughtful look at the cycle of production, consumption and waste in contemporary society. Refreshingly, she avoids self-righteous proselytizing and manages to create a far reaching, critical dialog about the reality and the psychology of the issue. Sarah acknowledges art as commodity and the artist–herself–as a contributor in the cycle and even begins to lessen her role to a degree through the transformation of packing and shipping materials into beautiful art objects. We’re happy today to introduce Sarah Bliss as d’Arte Board’s first guest blogger.

-Steph Gerolimatos

The accusatory “thief”, spelled out by Wilcox in huge letters she poured from a sack of white flour, points to the spot where a developer abandoned plans to build housing, after using the claim of beneficial development to encourage the city to take the land by eminent domain.“Eminent Domain No. 5″ by Emma Wilcox
Silver gelatin print
2006

When’s the last time you heard from an artist who’s a living, breathing example of what it looks like to craft a life where artmaking, livelihood, and personal and political values are deeply intertwined, constantly tested, and pushed and stretched in all kinds of fascinating ways? And whose imagemaking is pretty pitch, too?

Lucky me. I was at Emma Wilcox’s artist talk on Thursday night, given in conjunction with her show of haunting black-and-white silver gelatin photography and video, “Salvage Rights”. It’s up at Real Artways in Hartford, CT through June 14. Definitely catch it before it comes down.

Wilcox’s images, devoid of humans, but redolent with the human impact upon the land, are Read more »