Sarah Amos
Sarah Amos, A Hundred Rows, 2006
collagraph and carborundum etching,
8’ x 6 ½’
Lent by the Artist, Courtesy Reeves Contemporary, New York, NY
Sarah Amos’s large and technically-complex prints are landscapes of place, imagination, memory, and culture, where layers of marks, patterns, and colors overlap to form visually elaborate images. While each print is unique, thematic threads run throughout the work, tied together by a repeated vocabulary of forms. A master printer and native Australian who has lived in Vermont since the early 1990s, Amos is inspired by the art and geography of Australia as well as that of many other cultures. The wavy lines, dots, lace patterns, and architectural and geographic references derive from sources as diverse as Japanese prints, eighteenth century Dutch lace, Victorian floral motifs, textile patterns, aboriginal art, Chinese and Japanese furniture, Maori and Pacific Islands sculpture and textiles, African architecture, marine military maps, and tribal masks. With so much layering of content and form, Amos’s mural-sized prints embody her search for an identity and become road maps of her experiences real and imagined. — Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Director of Curatorial Affairs
“In the fall of 2005 I began researching the work of Utagawa Hiroshige, a Japanese printmaker who made a series of 53 exquisite landscape woodcuts called the Tokaido Highway Series 1834. I became absorbed by the concept and sequencing of the Series, which is one artist’s interpretation of 53 geographical landscapes located between two points. One piece in particular, The Hakone Pass, not only captivated me but also signified to me that I should interpret this famous suite using my own organic vocabulary. The catalyst for this project began five months later, in January of 2006, when I was sorting through my grandfather’s studio belongings in Australia. I found the very same woodcut, Utagawa Hiroshige’s The Hakone Pass, where it had been hidden for thirty years. A project was born. The paper tapestries in this exhibition are part of my ongoing investigation of this theme.”— Sarah Amos
Sarah Amos will present an Artist Talk on Saturday, June 2 at 3 pm.
