ART :: SARADA RAUCH IS FULL OF SNAKES AND CHOCOLATE
Sarada Rauch
It’s a bag full of snakes and chocolate
through December 23rd, 2012
Novella Gallery
164 Orchard Street
(Lower East Side) New York, 10002
Exit Strata is pleased to invite you to visit It’s a bag full of snakes and chocolate, Sarada Rauch’s first solo exhibition with Novella Gallery. While Rauch’s exploratory visual work transverses many mediums, for this recent collection the artist has focused on prints, mixed media and video.
Reinterpretation gives history more than one perspective. With this in mind, Rauch reinterprets traditional narratives using contemporary images to create new folklore. Her aim is to excavate the hidden histories within these narratives.
Rauch views her work as a version of oral tradition. In oral traditions, stories are kept alive by being re-told again and again, and change with each person orating them. The storyteller improvises a great deal of the narrative, reinterpreting the story and inserting their own perspective and imagery. The ability of a narrative to be reinterpreted gives it more than one perspective. This creates the possibility of having more than one perspective on the narratives we live with today.
The work in It’s a bag of snakes and chocolate is a deliberation on revolution as a circle. For example in the piece Mudra Owl: Tyranny and Adulation, Rauch considers the connection between crowd identity, the origins of leadership, and the ability of this relationship to abuse power. Her research into these subjects is referenced by endnotes, which are placed within the video, and collected in a book bound by the artist.
Everything in Rauch’s work is made by her own hand. Combining high and low technology, digital with the hand made, she makes static objects become animate. Rauch’s hand is always obvious in the work and calls attention to itself as a crafted piece in digital form. Her works acknowledge their own silliness and because of this they can also dabble with being genuine. Sarada Rauch is winking at you while telling you something heartfelt.
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Editor’s Note:
You may recognize Sarada Rauch’s name as one of the curators of our colleagues (and frequent contributors to ExSt online) the HELIOPOLIS PROJEKT collective in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, whose we’ll be celebrating again later this week. Check out an introduction to their organization here!
