Alumna Sara Stern '17 Featured in 'Of Several Depths' Exhibition at the plumb

Visual Arts alumna Sara Stern ’17 has work on display in the plumb’s Of Several Depths exhibition, which runs from April 14, 2021 to May 10, 2021, in Toronto, Canada. 

Curated by Miles Rufelds, the exhibition also features work by Alana Bartol, Erika DeFreitas, Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe, Dana Prieto, Maria Simmons, Angela Snieder, and Kate Whiteway.  

According to the gallery’s website, Of Several Depths “is composed of works that engage ‘the subterranean’ in one way or another—as a sprawling nexus of contested material systems, or as a physical distillation of broader, more occulted feelings and ideas. Collectively these projects present a multilayered picture of the underground, where imperialist resource extraction and industrial machinery collide with long, mysterious histories of poetic and more-than-natural speculation.”

Rufelds’ full essay on the exhibition is available to view here.

Composed of a 19th-century foundation vent, insulation foam, installation detritus, and 15 minutes of looped, single-channel video sound, Stern’s Rehearsal for a Crawl Space Expiration (2018) sits on large, light tiles surrounded by stark white walls. An indecipherable image lies beneath the rusting vent, its muted colors and dark lines only visible upon close inspection—well-suited to the exhibition’s preoccupation with buried artifacts. 

Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City; her work spans video, moving image installation, performance, printmaking, and photography. She also casts buildings, objects, histories, and sites as characters in experimental narratives. 

Stern has screened and exhibited her work in the US and internationally. Some of her most recent exhibitions include Open House, curated by Julia Rooney, Elegran, New York, NY (2020); In Practice: Other Objects, curated by Gee Wesley, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY (2019); hold your horses (solo show), Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (2019); Fine Arts Work Center Fellows Group Exhibition, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), Provincetown, MA (2019); and Fine Arts Work Center Fellows Group Exhibition, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (2019). 

She was the 2017—2018 Fountainhead Fellow in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she still teaches as a Co-Director and Core Faculty member of the VCUarts Summer Studio Program. Additionally, she received a 2018 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and a 2018—2019 Visual Arts Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Currently, she is a fellow in The Art & Law Program.

Before attending the School of the Arts, Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College.