Lost Holidays

Sarah Klein

June 22nd – August 10th​ , 2019

Opening Reception:  Saturday, June 22nd​, 6 – 9pm
Closing Reception:  Saturday, August 10​th​, 2 – 4pm

When I grasp for order I recognize nothing is fixed, everything keeps changing.

Telematic is pleased to present Lost Holidays, an exhibition of animation and prints by Sarah Klein, which celebrates life’s flowering in the face of its passing away. Klein’s images are full of rich colors and playful patterning. Yet they are ultimately reductive: a sustained meditation on time and change, which she emphasizes in this show through her juxtaposition of still and moving images. The imagery in Klein’s prints comes from collages that she initially makes with patterned paper and color swatches, then enhances with ink painting, and ultimately prints in overlapping and off-set, even off-kilter, arrangements. The juxtapositions in Klein’s prints thus mark discrete moments in the process of their production, which are brought to life as movement as the eye traverses their surfaces. Presented in series, indeed, they combine to create a moving tableau. Klein makes these dynamics most explicit here when complimenting her animated film, Misty Duet, with a risograph takeaway. While the print distills the film to the still frames that comprise it, the risograph is itself animated by the juxtapositions between its discrete cells, calling attention to the dynamic instability – the change – always already implicit in otherwise seemingly static things. In Lost Holidays, these considerations are, furthermore, inflected with the poetics of loss and remembrance. The color and patterning of Klein’s imagery evoke the fullness of summer, but as bygone or, at least, as over soon enough. Her work is explosive, the upheaval of a birthday party disco dance, which fades into the past only to fully appear as what it was in nostalgia. It is rich with longing, the reaching and stretching of a desire that never exhausts – indeed, makes a place for – its motivating loss.

Bio: Sarah Klein is a visual artist working in animation and printmaking. She employs drawing, paper cutouts and live-action footage to create narrative and abstract pieces. Informed by a decade of working in stop-motion, she continues to expand on the language of movement within print-based works. Using image sequences and repeated forms, she creates compositions that highlight the parts that make up the whole. She has presented at Southern Exposure, Mill Valley Film Festival and Kala Art Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area; Anthology Film Archives and Transmitter Gallery in New York; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit; Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb; Festival Tweetakt in Utrecht; General Public in Berlin. She is the co-owner and illustrator of The Local Foods Wheel. She is the curator and program director of the Peephole Cinema in San Francisco, and she is the founder and co-producer of the Stop & Go animation series.

Image: Long Bloom by Sarah Klein, Ink on Paper, 22 1/2 x 15 3/8
Artwork Photo Credit: John Janca