Sarah Hardesty: Time Binding

Wyatt Resident Artists Gallery

Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington is pleased to present Time Binding, a new solo exhibition of installation, painting and drawing by resident artist Sarah Hardesty. Predominantly created after a pandemic year spent in a cabin in a remote part of Washington state, Time Binding is Hardesty’s abstracted documentation of dramatic natural phenomena that find their parallel in universal human experiences.

In Time Binding, Sarah Hardesty uses found object installations, paintings and drawings to take viewers on a journey to a vast and solitary landscape of craggy snow-capped mountains, flowing rivers and shifting tectonic plates. The works are unified through Hardesty’s visual vocabulary of additive and subtractive lines and her restrained palette of white, black and gray with flourishes of cautionary orange and ice blue. Seen together, the works describe a singular landscape in which the viewer’s vantage point shifts cinematically from sweeping horizon lines to aerial views and close-ups of rivers, mountains and trees.

It is through Hardesty’s evocative mark-making and layering that the viewer becomes aware of the artist’s presence and that the emotional tone of the work comes to the fore. Layers of paint, like strata in the earth, reveal or conceal forms underneath: a buildup of black paint slathered across a surface obscures lines incised into a panel like scars. A mountain crest in the distance crumbles into a pile of rock, the choppy surface of a flowing river is depicted in hot orange. Hardesty’s abstracted images of nature in its most grandiose forms communicate moments of heightened emotional intensity, alluding to human fallibility and the changeable nature of life.

About the Artist

Sarah Hardesty’s drawings, paintings, and installations reference geologic and environmental happenings and incorporate personal experience with layering of time, space, and reflection. Hardesty’s work has been exhibited at VisArts, (Rockville, MD); Metro Micro Gallery (Arlington, VA); ISE Cultural Foundation, (New York, NY); Davidson Contemporary, (New York, NY); MPG Gallery, (Boston, MA); Wheaton College, (Norton, MA) and the Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ). She has been awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Wassaic Project, The Carriage House at Islip Art Museum, Santa Fe Art Institute and Vermont Studio Center. Hardesty is the recipient of numerous financial awards including a Fairfax County Artist Grant (2020); a VFIC Mednick Fellowship (2019); a Leon Levy award (2012) and an award from The Joan Mitchell Foundation (2007). Hardesty holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Arizona and a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College. She was born in Strong, Maine and is currently based in the Washington DC area where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia.

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Additional Information

“Time Binding” Exhibition Catalog