The 2019 Platform exhibition of art by Sarah Svetlana engages with the IHC’s 2018–19 public events series theme, Social Securities, which considers the diverse human experiences of security and how people in a variety of social, political, and cultural contexts respond to conditions of precarity and uncertainty.
Sarah Svetlana is a Los Angeles-based artist who, as a painter, explores the fragmentation of the subject in an ongoing search for home. An agency model, turned art model, Sarah Svetlana used her body as the first medium in her initial search for identity and self-expression. Her art has drawn and painted roadmaps between the two worlds of her upbringing in the irreconcilable cultures of Soviet Belarus and Immigrant America.
Her paintings suggest hectic movement, but also the stillness locked in each gesture of that movement. Her work is “rooted somewhere between the insanity of Kandinsky and the line-certainty of the early 20th century Futurists.” Each painting is a piece of the complex topography that defines both her identity and her work. Through the narratives created by a methodical application of color, she delivers an invocation of home—spectral and surreal, but familiar too.
