Artist of the Month: Sarah Briggs

For the month of March, 51 Main will feature an exhibit by Middlebury College student Sarah Briggs ’14.5. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, March 13 from 7–8pm.

“After growing up primarily overseas, the American landscape has provided a great deal of inspiration for my recent work. As a student of art history I am interested in the intrinsic value of landscapes as compositions themselves, made an acceptable and admirable subject for painting by the innovation of the Impressionists, who are a great influence on my work. As a student of dance I am also interested in the effect of bodies on an environment and how the play between figure and landscape can inspire meaning and story in the imagination of the viewer.

This series of oil paintings is dedicated to the vistas of Glacier National Park in Montana. Each of these scenes is a recreation of the Montana landscape from photographs I have taken from my own explorations of the park. In each of the paintings I experimented with different techniques of employing brushstrokes, pallet knives, and oil pastels, learning as I went how to communicate to the viewer the feeling behind my memories of the park through gesture and color.

The photographs on display mark my first exploration in film photography. Each is an original print from black and white 35mm film. Stripped of the color of my paint, I was forced to look at the landscape through a different lens and found that photography provides a unique opportunity to play with perceptions of reality. With these photographs I was challenging myself to evoke a sense of curiosity and fantasy in the viewer with an apparatus that, unlike a paintbrush, can only capture what really lies in front of the artist at a given moment in time.”