Starfish is a verb, netflix takes time, and space is measured in arms
A conversation between Liz Bernstein & Sarah Thibault
Elizabeth Bernstein, Co Director of Royal NoneSuch Gallery and curator of Starfish, speaks with Sarah Thibault about her solo show. The following is a transcript of a phone conversation that has been edited for length and content.
Liz Bernstein: Talk to me about your work.
Sarah Thibault: Sure. This show has five large oil paintings, all of which were created from photographic source material — most of which I have taken while hanging out in my bedroom before I go to sleep. With these works I am trying to capture moments of vulnerability, laziness and maybe a hint of PMS.
LB: I feel like our entire world is becoming this dystopian hell — for various reasons. It’s always sort of been a dystopian hell, but maybe because of my increased awareness of this moment I’m really drawn to art right now that feels like a journal entry. Looking at these paintings feels like I’m inside someone’s mushy parts, which sounds like a vagina now that I’m saying it out loud.
ST: (Laughs) They are very personal. I like to imagine that if the show was music, it would be on the lite rock station.
The images come to me very organically. I’m just watching TV with my salt lamp on next to my bed and I take a photo of that moment, or there’s a still from the show I’m watching that resonates with something I’m thinking about. In that way they are very personal just in the way and the physical place that they are conceptualized.
In terms of subject matter, I think it’s important to represent people as less-idealized version of themselves to make it ok for people to have those feelings of wanting to be lazy or checking out. It’s almost the opposite of what you should do when you see the world going to shit — you should probably get out there and volunteer or door knock, but if inside you feel a little hopeless or you get overwhelmed, then it can help to unwind and take a break from society.
LB: They are beyond super relatable. I also think that the fact that they remind me of Instagram posts but are 8-foot oil paintings- that’s one step away from carving them out of marble- it’s an interesting juxtaposition.
ST: That’s a good point. That contrast of high and low culture is something I wanted to draw attention to, particularly with the large scale. Using oil paint, sometimes I forget the history because the way I use it is a less formal way of using paint. I do a lot of dry brushing. There’s a lot of line work and transparency so it feels more casual than it might be if I were using traditional oil painting techniques.
But I think having the big scale and that long history of painting in the background helps to elevate these moments, to give them the same level of significance that they have in my life and what I see as the cultural / psychic space they take up based on the number of people that also have these same experiences.
LB: My favorite artwork is work that comes from everyday life. I love the fact that the most dramatic things happen in the most boring moments. I have this memory of being dumped when I was 22 by someone I was super in love with. I literally dropped the phone and went and sat on a stairwell in my parents house.
I can picture myself in the third person sitting on that stairwell and it is one of the most dramatic scenes from my life and there is nothing happening. It’s just a figure sitting down
ST: It’s all internal —
LB: Yes! I think recognizing juicy in-between moments as holding this powerful emotional significance is why I am in love with your work.
ST: Thank you! Yes that’s very well-articulated. I think if we were maybe not dealing with a constant barrage of crap everyday, the images of sitting and watching TV wouldn’t be quite as loaded for me. Their rejection of the outside world and escape into pop culture would be more humdrum. I hope that is articulated somewhere in the work.
Back to the Instagram factor- I’m really interested in the way that people stage “candid” photos of themselves doing things that you wouldn’t normally want people to see like wearing a face mask or sitting in bed, but then their hair is done or maybe they have eye makeup on. The personal / public interplay that happens on social media is fascinating.
LB: Can you mention quickly what you do for work?
ST: Oh sure, I freelance as a digital marketer so I help companies put together Instagram posts and as a result spend a lot of time online, unpacking the tropes of social media.
LB: I think it’s interesting, we are the first generation of artists who will see what the trickle down effect of social media is in the art world and how we are going to translate it into a visual language.
Photography now has moved so far away from the representational since Instagram has become our representational culture. I’m not saying no photographers work representationally, but it has decreased. There’s a lot more creation of unique objects. So I think for painting to come in and tackle that void is fascinating.
ST: I think about a similar transition point in art that was driven by changes in photography — the Impressionist movement. The Impressionists, who I love, were grappling with the beginning of photography and what their role would be as painters.
I find that I am adopting some of their strategies: working really quickly and trying to capture a moment that is impossible to capture with precision in paint. For example, all those outdoor party scenes where there are these sideways glances. I’m trying to access some of that ‘fleeting moment’ quality, along with an interest in light as a way to express the energy and emotion of a scene.
LB: You’re doing what a photograph doesn’t do.
At the same time, when photography was a young lass in the early part of the last century, people would make photos that tried to look like paintings. They would have young men with sheets running through trees and try to mimic…
ST: — the lack of precision you get with painting.
LB: Yes, sort of shying away from the precision you get from photographs.
One thing I find fascinating about screen culture, as someone who comes from a background of addiction, and who has been sober for a long time, is that I can identify signs that our entire culture is dealing with an addiction to screens.
While it’s not a massive problem, there are elements of a lack of choice around the use of screens and devices that resonate with my own challenges when dealing with other addictions.
ST: That’s a good point. Do you see behaviors that you’ve talked about in other contexts reflected in screen use?
LB: One of the hallmarks of addiction is that people say they don’t want to do something, but they find themselves still doing it all the time. And that is definitely something I hear people saying all the time about their screen use. They’ll say things like: I need to put my phone down. I used to read books now I watch Netflix, I opened my phone to look for something and I just spent 20 minutes doing something else.
These are all conversations that are in my head when I look at your paintings. From these very simple images, they come up — how we feel our feelings, how we entertain ourselves, being a little isolated.
ST: I’m also interested in the fine line between passion and an excitement for an object or activity and when that crosses over into a more self-destructive impulse. I’m in the process of writing an essay that starts with a passage about the difference between collecting and hoarding. They aren’t separate things, it’s more of a venn diagram where at some point a destructive urge overlaps and the behavior becomes a problem for the individual.
I think screen use is totally like that. I would say we have ignored some of the smaller symptoms of this — a cultural avoidance of intimacy or not dealing with problems in a direct way. How many times have we texted a person something that probably should have been a phone call? We could see that as part of an addicted set of behaviors.
LB: Something I noticed, in regards to the title of the show, Starfish. In the Starfish painting, the figure takes up so much space and seems to be trying to take up space. But the figures in the other paintings feel smaller in the frame.
ST: That’s true, they don’t take up the majority of the canvas.
LB: They’re implied, their psychic energy is everywhere.
ST: I think that’s ultimately what I wanted, that in the gallery you would feel the presence of the figure spread out across the gallery rather than in each individual painting.
Also, with the orange light of the salt lamp, I see it as a feminine energy that is maybe a stand-in for the presence of the figure. By having that color palette dominate, I think of it as a continuation of that spreading out.
LB: My last question is about the way that you use your size to determine the scale of the works — something we talked about when putting together your statement as well as in the hanging of the show.
ST: Yes, that was important to me that it somehow relate to my size, which is approximate 5’ tall, to the works in the show. When planning out the paintings, I made sure that all the works were going to be my height or bigger to ensure that they would feel larger than life. I wanted the show to feel overhung, a bit extra- if you will.
When we were installing the show, I wanted to make sure that we somehow took my physicality into consideration in the placement of the works. This meant hanging the paintings lower than the 60” centering standard applied to traditional gallery installations so the work was closer to my eye level.
We also used my wingspan to determine the positioning of the works from the corners of the gallery. We all liked that this made them slightly off-centered, and for me it like an added layer of ‘starfishing’ to have my body implied in that negative space.
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