Statement
I approach photography and other documentary media through the lens of digital manipulation. In the computer I cut up, rearrange, erase, and grow little bits of our recorded memories. I start with existing memory objects: Flickr feeds, wedding albums found on ebay, Googled paparazzi photographs and voice memos. Then I work like a skin grafter, taking small pieces of the memory object and building expanses of new, invented material. Through my manipulations I create confabulations that are an amalgam of memory and imagination. In these confabulations, limbs become twisted and contorted, landscapes become elongated and exaggerated, bodies and voices disappear and reappear. In each piece I conjure the unseen and unspoken—making visible desire, anxiety, fantasy, and loss—shared narratives that have been exiled from our photo albums and Instagram feeds. These confabulations take many forms: I created an iphone App that erases a piece of a photograph every time you revisit it, audio conversations with a deepfake of my deceased dad, an Instagram feed of a family with everyone erased except for the mother, and an augmented reality project tracing a missing person through the hole they left behind. At the center of my practice are questions about the media objects we use to preserve our lives. How do we use them to remember, and what happens if we choose to forget? What is the afterlife of our media objects when we are gone? Do our memory objects decay or can they continue to grow and change?
Bio
Sarah Sweeney is an artist who creates digital interventions in photography, sound and video. She works across a range of media forms, including photographic composites, iPhone apps, photographic sculptures, augmented reality, stereoscopy, animation, video, and Instagram feeds. She is an Associate Professor at Skidmore College in New York and received her BA from Williams College and her MFA from Columbia University.
Sarah has worked with the new media arts organizations CultureHub, Wave Farm and Rhizome to develop projects including the iphone app The Forgetting Machine. She has been an artist in residence at MASSMoCA and Catwalk. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in exhibitions at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, Bucharest Art Week, the Meet Factory, and the UCR/California Photography Museum. She has published articles in MAST, Accelerate and HASTAC and co-guest edited Media-N, the journal for the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association. She has given academic and artist talks about erasure, ordinary media and memory objects at BRIC, MIT, Green-Wood Cemetery, the Tang Museum, and the International Symposium on Electronic Art.
CV
Download current CV here.