Sarah Kabot: Acts of Recording and Replicating

Sarah Kabot's drawings, installations and sculptures duplicate objects using faulty methods of reproduction. The work calls into question the possibility of creating a genuine or infallible record and emphasizes the shift between original and reproduction.

For Sarah, art making unravels and reveals gaps between the symbolic or historical significance of an object, and the inert nature of the object itself. Her investigations increasingly respond to sites that seem to be organized rationally, but have idiosyncratic instances within the system. Recently these have included monuments, collections, and libraries. Sarah is struck by the ways these types of systems offer particularly limited concepts of the past to the context the present.

In this body of work, through acts of recording and replicating, anomalies are highlighted or erased, classifications of things become muddled.  The relationship between the source object and the representation (drawing, sculpture or installation) inherently becomes unbalanced. Delicate or fragile materials are chosen to heighten the impermanence of the replication, mimicking the fleeting quality of a glimpse. Systems of copying, mirroring, and amplification are used, creating tension between the original and the intervention, between the existent object and the reimagined object.

The pieces aim to be almost-forms, visual echoes; and interventions become embodied double-takes.

Bio

Sarah Kabot, was born in Royal Oak, Michigan. The visually repetitive environment of the suburbs continues to inform and influence her sculptures, drawings, and installations. Sarah has presented work at the Akron Museum of Art (OH), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (OH), The Drawing Center (NY), Mixed Greens Gallery (NY), Smack Mellon (NY), the Peabody Essex Museum (MA), Tracy Williams Ltd (NY), Tegnerforbundet in Oslo, Norway, and at many other venues. She has been granted residencies at Sculpture Space (NY), Dieu Donne Papermill (NY), Swing Space the LMCC (NY), and Headlands Center for the Arts (CA).

Sarah received her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design in 1998, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2002. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio.