Event Detail

Supplyframe DesignLab presents Sarah Umles: Unearthed

Saturday, May 25, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Cost: Free

Sponsor: City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division

For more information call: 415-730-4968

Or click here: https://www.sarahumles.com/exhibitions

DesignLab presents Pasadena-based artist Sarah Umles in a solo exhibition, Unearthed. The show runs from May 25 – July 28, 2024 and opens with a public reception on Saturday, May 25th from 2-5pm. Umles’s solo exhibition at DesignLab features the premiere collection of artworks in her ongoing investigation into anthropogenic causes of environmental imbalance and the climate crisis, as well as their impacts on the Earth and its inhabitants. Unearthed is an arts-based research project at the nexus of technology, media, consumerism, anthropocentrism, and land politics. Through multimedia installations incorporating found objects, mass-manufactured consumer products, industrial materials, natural elements, and archival media, Umles considers chaos, corrosion, death, and grief at the monumental scale of societal decay, species extinctions, and ecological collapse. “Unearthed features almost two years worth of research and artistic production. Last year, I was awarded an artist grant by the City of Pasadena, so I’ve been able to expand the project beyond what I initially thought possible,” Umles commented. “Now I’m experimenting with new materials like oil, ice, iron oxide, silk, even scented candles. And this is just the beginning of a much longer process of interrogation and creative response.” Sarah Umles is a queer-femme Ashkenazi Jewish artist, born in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She currently stewards Gabrielino-Tongva tribal land in Pasadena. Her work explores how social/cultural identity and self-knowing are constructed through our relationships with material culture, visual media, nature, and technology. Through interstitial practices, she seeks to subvert systems of oppression - namely: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and anthropocentrism. Umles earned her Master’s from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Creative Writing with a minor in Film & Visual Culture at the University of California, Riverside. Her interdisciplinary work has been shown internationally in both traditional and alternative spaces. Umles is a recipient of the 2023-2024 City of Pasadena Individual Artist Grant. The Unearthed exhibition at Supplyframe DesignLab was made possible in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.