Monument to the Unattainable
- Fri, Jan 29, 2021 - Sat, May 8, 2021 On view Monday -Saturday 9 AM - 5 PM
TANK Space1824 Spring Street
Meet Sarah and view the installation May 1st from 6-8 PM.
Monument to the Unattainable emerged from a fascination with ancient monuments and ruins: their status as the ultimate of icons, with their piles of rubble and broken facades. Unassembled, their remains have a wholeness that cannot exist in a realized state. The installation is a reflection of those monumental fragments caught between destruction and resurrection, conception, and creation. Through its visual entropy, the work captures the moment of conceptualization when the ideal is still visible: the gap between ideation and reality. By elevating the piles of rubble to the status of icons, the work embeds them with permanence and value. Contrasting the found and the fabricated, the ancient and new, the installation is a tangible representation of our desire for the impossible and the process of idolization. It is an epitaph for the unattainable, for those things imagined but never found.
Monument to the Unattainable is an installation of a large pyramidal stone sculpture that references imagery and “monuments'' discovered beneath Texas highway underpasses and abandoned construction sites. The site-specific work is constructed with stones and casts adhered to an armature and placed throughout the exhibition space. The stones and casts vary in their scale, color and material. The pyramidal form is structurally weighted, surrounded by invisibly suspended and fallen stones, as if in the process of creating and departing from the central construct. Installed to create the illusion of a paused explosion, the exhibition creates a physical space of impossibility that defies gravity and contrasts our desire to realize fully complete objects.
About the Artist:
Sarah DePetris is an artist whose practice integrates painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and printmaking. DePetris often depicts imagery of pyramidal structures and piles of stone, emerging from her fascination with monuments and idolization. Her work explores the gaps between reality and desire, often rendering believable but impossible scenes with bizarrely vibrant colors, bold mark-making and distorted depths. DePetris exhibits her work nationally, with upcoming solo exhibitions at Tank Space, Sawyer Yards in Houston and at the Fort Worth Creative Arts Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has been exhibited in international, national and regional juried exhibitions, including the Vignette Art Fair at the Women’s Museum Building in Dallas and the Rosenzweig Biennial at the Arts and Science Center Museum. Her work is also included in the permanent collections of Capital One and the University of Texas at Tyler. Since graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009, DePetris has been living and working in Dallas, Texas. DePetris is currently pursuing an MFA in Drawing and Painting at the University of North Texas.
All exhibitions are free and open to the public Monday - Saturday 9 AM - 5 PM.
TANK Space - Spring Street Studios
1824 Spring Street, Houston, TX 77007
