Sarah Porter

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

Gallery Opening Hours

During regular events 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.