CARDIOVASCULAR
An exhibit of new work by Sarah Barsness and Veronica Sahagún
An exhibit of new work by Sarah Barsness and Veronica Sahagún
Life Itself
Daniel Coffeen
Look: life, bloody and blooming. Only there's no blood per se, only yarn, sticks, fabric. The odd thing is it's not less alive for it. Textiles have assumed the mantle of life but in their own weave. The artists have wrested the style of bodies—the coagulation, consistency, comportment—and transferred it to fabric where it has found a new way of going. Life in these impossible hues, this way of hanging.Daniel Coffeen
Meanwhile, each artist has wrested the style from the other: Barsness has assumed the mantle of Sahagún and Sahagún, the mantle of Barsness. What we see here, then, are not artists and things but circuits of life.
Style, the way a body goes, cannot be freed from the physical for then what would it be? But, mad scientists, these artists have discovered a way to isolate and transfer the animating force of bodies. In so doing, the artists have performed nothing less than a miracle: they've given us a glimpse, albeit indirect, of life itself.
Daniel Coffeen, PhD, is a rhetorician and theorist, tending to matters visual and linguistic. He lives in San Francisco where he is, among other things, adjunct faculty at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Installation views: Cardiovascular
