Sarah Nelson Wright - Locations & Dislocation

Sarah Nelson Wright - Locations & Dislocation
  • Title: Sarah Nelson Wright - Locations & Dislocation
  • Dimensions: variable
  • Materials: vinyl tape, digital prints
  • Primary Medium: interdisciplinary
  • Year Created: 2008-2011
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Artwork Description


LOCATIONS & DISLOCATION is a project about moving. It creatively and subjectively describes the people who move from home to home in the urban environment, swept by the forces of the city and the ebbs and flows of life changes. The marks of their presence often vanish from each place they leave, replaced by new tenants and sometimes new buildings entirely. This energy of movement, both voluntary and forced, is a vital component of the contemporary urban landscape. The process: I collect an individual’s past and current addresses, map these moves, and then remove the map, leaving an abstract line drawing. I collect the reasons for each move, such as: job, love, priced out, rats, light, band, adventure, safety, space, etc. I print the line drawing and the reasons on a postcard and mail it to the person. I also create installations with overlapping lines from different individuals, including a piece focused on gentrification in Brooklyn and an interactive mapping installation in Brazil. The project searches for the poetry in this personal data, creating abstract biographies of a person as he or she moves through a city. It reveals the complexities that underlie a mobile population and excavates the choices and forces that shape an individual’s path, while providing abstract documentation and affirmation of people whose often untraceable presence is essential to the fabric of urban life.

Sarah Nelson Wright

Sarah Nelson Wright

Bio: Sarah Nelson Wright is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates interdisciplinary media projects that poetically investigates the changing urban landscape and seeks opportunities for public dialog and participation. In 2009, she created Brooklyn Makes, a site-specific video installation on manufacturing in North Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited diverse venues including CONFLUX, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, PowerHouse ArtSpace, Bring to Light 2010, Art for Change, SESC in Brazil and ACVic in Spain. She holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College, and teaches at NYU Polytechnic and Hunter College. Artist Statement: I have always been fascinated by the way ideas translate into the lived world. That is, how our understanding of the way things work shapes the ways we interact; how our experiences reinforce or interrupt our beliefs; and how we form our values and identities within a larger cultural context. As an artist and writer making interdisciplinary media projects, I seek to engage with social and political issues at the point where they intimately affect everyday life. The goal of my work is to create platforms for investigation and to open spaces for reconsideration of naturalized values and systems. I believe this exploration is integral to the process of collective re-imagination needed to unlock new possibilities for how we live and how we represent and understand ourselves and the communities and systems in which we participate. My projects share three common themes: creativity as a method for investigation, conversation as the primary source material, and local community as the laboratory for understanding the world and ourselves. I seek to create work that is both poetic and experiential and, in some small way, offers an opportunity to recognize our values and our world as constructed and malleable, but still complex and meaningful to our daily lives. It is in this recognition that I see the possibility for change.

Website: sarahnelsonwright.com/

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