Sarah Porter

The Buried Sun

May 29 - June 27, 2026

About the Exhibition

The mixed-media works in The Buried Sun evoke both perpetual loss and volatile renewal. The artist uses figures, both human and animal, taken from vintage sources, and layers them over collage, watercolor, and acrylic backgrounds. The phototransfer technique gives these figures a dangerous transparency, leaving them always on the edge of obliteration. Civil war soldiers, boxers, children, and odalisques alike become windows onto their own evanescence, with fluid colors and fragmentary images and texts gleaming through flesh made glass. The figures express a rapturous vulnerability, as if they had become so transparent to their own experience that they might dissolve into sensory immediacy.

At the same time, the works are possessed by an unpredictable energy, where loss is revealed as metamorphosis. Microbes swell into dark suns and hover over unsettled landscapes, while storm clouds pour into quiet rooms. Hundreds of tiny slivers of collage—cut from vintage magazines and applied one by one—come unmoored from the images that once contained them and transform into pure radiance. This explosive color sweeps across the works in beams, scrolls, haloes, and starbursts, suggesting a transfiguring power immanent and barely constrained in all things.

To create in our current era of brutality and destruction is to grieve. The works in The Buried Sun grieve in color, in fractured imagery, and in a past rendered as both shadow and unending light. But to create in our era is also to commit to the radiance that cannot go out: to a sun that is buried, but burning.

Opening Night

Friday, May 29, 7-10 PM
With Live Audio Visual Performance by Sarah Porter and Todd Polenberg.

Reserve your spot.

Gallery Opening Hours

During regular event hours and by appointment.

For purchase inquiries please contact DelightFactoryNYC@gmail.com

About the Artist

Sarah Porter is an artist and novelist based in Brooklyn. As a VJ, she has created improvisatory video collage at venues including Roseland Ballroom, Nokia Theater, Joe’s Pub, Tonic, and Galapagos, both solo and with the collective Fort/Da. She also performed with her Burning Man camp, Image Node, and at many underground parties around New York. Her published novels include THE LOST VOICES TRILOGY and TENTACLE & WING, with HMH, and VASSA IN THE NIGHT, WHEN I CAST YOUR SHADOW (a Bram Stoker award finalist,) and NEVER-CONTENTED THINGS, all with Tor Teen. Her adult fantasy debut, PROJECTIONS, will be released on Tor on 2/13/24. Her art and illustration work has appeared at the Bring to Light festival, in her novel VASSA IN THE NIGHT, and on websites including Chant de la Sirene and Torteen.

Works

Windfall

14 by 20 inches
Watercolor, acrylic, photo transfer, and collage on paper, 2026
$950
“Windfall” is an image of rapture and sorrow, of an ascent that cannot be distinguished from a fall, of tidal gravity pulling back and forth between the landscape and the wounded sun. A surge of radiance bleeding from the sun knocks a screaming apple from the tree, and woman tumbles down to reach for it, as if it were her sister, or herself: a windfall of recognition, there in the grass.
The Buried Sun

11 by 14 inches
Acrylic, collage, photo transfer, and colored pencil on tinted paper, 2025
$700
The sun at the heart of this image is trapped halfway below ground, entangled with the roots and bones—but it is also halfway emergent, bursting out in new life and luminance. It rises into an ink-dark sky, fighting for morning.
The Window Men

14 by 20 inches
Acrylic, photo transfer, paint pen, and collage on paper, 2025
$950
The figures in this piece—vintage boxers and criminals, graduates and Victorian athletes, and, at the top left, a Civil War soldier with an arrow illustrating the path of the bullet that pierced his shoulder—are largely caught in the act or aftermath of violence. The collage background shines through them, exposing them as ghosts barely holding on through a tracery of ink, while hoops of radiance mark their fall out of time.
The Body Is Not What We Have Been Told

14 by 20 inches
Granulated watercolor, photo transfer, collage, and special-effects acrylics on paper, 2025
$950
The nudes in this piece, taken from Victorian pornography, are simultaneously eroticized and transparent, vanishing into the bruised and broken background. The black, microbial sun pins them in an unresolvable dialogue between two different states of transparency: the vital immediacy of experience in which the self becomes as clear as glass, and the quiet erasure of death.
How the Rabbits Tell It

14 by 20 inches
Watercolor, acrylic, photo transfer, and collage on paper, 2025
$950
This piece presents the experience of being—in night, in windblown grass, in movement, and in moonlight—as the spiraling rabbits might feel it. Humans are present but decentered, inverted, a storm cloud of faces overhead. The illumination of being belongs instead to the rabbits, and to a single window, glowing and adrift.
Suture II

11.7 by 16.5 inches
Collage, photo transfer, and acrylic on black paper, 2024
$800
This is an image of our brokenness—hearts, minds, relationships—and of our crude but valiant efforts to repair both ourselves and our world. The red thread is surgical and urgent, unraveling from the red rose in the background, attempting to suture together all that has come apart.
The Cells

18 by 24 inches
Collage and acrylic on tinted paper, 2025
$1200
“The Cells” expresses the uncanny quality of life under fascism, where all that is joyous, busy, and ordinary nonetheless occurs in a state of captivity.
The Obliteration Games

18 by 24 inches
Collage, photo transfer, and acrylic on tinted paper, 2025
$1200
The source photos used in this piece—mainly Victorians who must have died long ago and antique animal X-rays—are both illuminated and broken, partially erased, by the paint blotches above and below them. To live and create in a time of anthropogenic mass extinction, and of threatened human extinction, requires us to layer our daily lives over a constant subtext of grief. Only the starbursts of uncontrolled energy escape the cancellation marked by the X.
Thicket

18 by 24 inches
Collage, photo transfer, watercolor, acrylics, and special-effects acrylics on tinted paper, 2026
$1200
A crowd with distorted faces—pleated in on themselves—gazes up at a world which exceeds their comprehension while still holding them enmeshed. They appear alienated from the larger realms of being by the solipsism of human concerns, but they are still yearning for reunion. Red lines of connection tumble from the sky: the thicket that entangles all living beings.
Hush

11 by 14 inches
Collage on tinted paper, 2025
$700
A word flies from mouth to mouth, seeking somewhere it can at last alight. Instead it is silenced before it can land, shot down like a bird. A woman seated in the grass watches it fall without regret.
Lady with a Wolf Bouquet

11 by 14 inches
Acrylic, collage, and photo transfer on tinted paper, 2025
$700
An elegant lady—divided against herself and shadowed by the collage fragments behind her—holds a posey of wolves in both hands. Presumably you have invited her to dinner, and she is bringing the wolf bouquet to grace your table with its musk and snapping teeth.
Storm

11 by 14 inches
Watercolor, archival marker, photo transfer, and collage on paper, 2025
$700
A storm has slipped into the room. Only by climbing the ladders can you hope to turn it off.
A Room without Memory

11 by 11 inches
Watercolor, archival marker, photo transfer, and collage on paper, 2025
$600
Wind scrolls through a room where transparent figures recede into forgetfulness. Only the nautilus shell still preserves a sense of who they were inside its chambers. They know they came into the room for some important purpose, but what that reason is eludes their grasp.