Sara St. Clair
The National Correspondence Coalition (NCC) is a publicly engaged project which serves to create interpersonal narratives. Existing as a structured organization to encourage the art of letter-writing, the NCC is simultaneously communal and individual. An unspoken alliance of members write to one another, creating an invisible network of communication—a community sharing dialogue rather than place. Built on a framework of bureaucracy, the National Correspondence Coalition mimics the forms and guidelines of federal institutions to elevate the practice of correspondence. As the founder and sole employee of the NCC, my role is simultaneously highly involved and eerily passive. The art is born in the connection between writer/sender and reader/receiver, and yet never appears in the traditional gallery context. As the artist, I only mediate these interactions, not author them. Members enroll to join something larger than themselves and receive the customary letter-writing materials for doing so.
Sleep Drawing
I explored the relationship between the body, emotion and the subconscious in my piece, Sleep Drawing. In general, I am interested in human emotion, and how we experience emotion not only mentally, but bodily, subconsciously and relationally. While unconscious, I tracked the movement of my body through a subtractive mark making process. By sleeping on a graphite coated canvas, I redefine the body from model to maker.
Sentences on Time
Works Included: 15 minutes?, video, 2019, Outside/Inside, lightbulbs, steel tubing, drywall, arduino microcontroller, 2019, Tick, audio, 2019, Time Stamp, letters received, 2019, Rolodex, ink on paper, 2019
Dimensions variable
Sentences on Time contemplates the definition of time and it's understood and unacknowledged effects on our lives. Five individual pieces work collectively to survey and catalog the passing of time in this two-week solo exhibition.
Body Drawing
In an exploration of the contrast between mindless and mindful bodily movement, I created these subtractive drawings which both denunciate traditional art practice and study movement in relation to thought. Within this series, I decenter the female nude as the traditional art subject and re-center the form as the object; the maker. Through predetermined actions, charcoal coated canvases were marked by the transfer of material onto my body.
In the Round (Proposal)
In the Round encourages all those who sit to directly engage with those around them. The seat is raised up 4 feet to create a third space that transcends those standing in the surrounding area. This transcendence, paired with a vocal sound piece, will encourage participants to engage in a higher level of connection. When each seat is taken, a layer of a harmony will is added, playing from speakers in the installation. This creates a sense of community and likeness between strangers. In this digital age, many people skip the moments which are most valuable– those moments of connection with another of our kind. In the Round will simultaneously surface this tendency and remedy it.
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