Sarah Porter

Séance

October 14 - November 18, 2023

About the Exhibition

The project began as an attempt to translate the artist's live, improvisatory video work into an analogue form. The many layers comprised of vintage images collaged or transferred, along with photos captured by the artist, all parallel the techniques employed in clip-based video mixing as they multiply on different scales or mirror one another.

However, the act of creating such images in a static medium, fixing them on paper, has transformed their meaning. In video, all these layers seamlessly merge into a depthless field where the images are juxtaposed and interact with one another, but nonetheless inhabit a common plane of pixels. The past dances across the screen, yet there is a sense of security in that unified, projected brilliance. Its ghosts remain contained.

Working on paper allows the layers to maintain their independence, enabling them to generate both an abyss and a sense of flight. When contemporary and vintage images are arranged in strata, they imply a descent into the past. The ghosts hear the wind of this descent, and they look up to see us rushing to meet them. These same strata also serve as a means of ascent, like a staircase for the ghosts to climb; they arrive lightly, silently, and peer at us from around the doorframes.

Infinite hauntings compose the human world, with all the lives, thoughts, failures, and aspirations that brought humanity to this moment remaining close at hand, intimately woven through our collective dreams. Like a séance, the works in this show pull back the veil, enabling the ghosts to find themselves in their viewers’ eyes.

Gallery Opening Hours

Saturdays: 2:00-6:00 PM
and by appointment
for purchase inquiries please contact us at 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.

Colonnade

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
22x30”
$1,800 - SOLD
A colonnade in the dusk resolves unexpectedly into towers of faces, all of them watching you pass by. When you turn to confront them, they become again aspects of the architecture, anonymous, something less than statues--but the sense of imminence remains, as if every stone is on the verge of speech. You suspect their lost identities: the mesmerist, the coquette, the immigrant, the philosopher, the lonely child.
Seance

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
18 X 24”
Photo courtesy of artist
$1,000
The central face in the artwork originates from an antique photo of a Victorian child discovered by the artist in a thrift store. It was re-photographed and subsequently overlaid with a layer of collaged faces sourced from vintage magazines. The body of the figure is composed of imagery derived from early X-ray experiments conducted on animals. Delicate lace detailing in the artwork was meticulously hand-drawn, and the hands were created through photo transfers of antique doll hands from the artist's personal collection. These hands were arranged in a manner reminiscent of their placement on a séance table.
The inspiration and driving force behind this artistic creation stemmed from the artist's research into 19th-century séances, conducted in preparation for their forthcoming novel titled "PROJECTIONS," set to be published by Tor on February 13, 2024.
Self Portrait With Flies

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
18x24”
Photo courtesy of artist
$1,000
A photograph of myself with doubled eyes, haloed in angelic, gold-framed flies, forms the central image. Vintage faces lurk beneath my skin. The light bulb dangling from between my fingers is, perhaps, my most essential emblem, my personal plate of eyeballs; in addition to their associations with ideas, with guiding lights, and with the soul, light bulbs appear in my novels as generative seeds, hatching both danger and dreams.
Paris

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
18x24”
Photo courtesy of artist
Sold
The naked figures were rephotographed from a friend’s collection of vintage Moulin Rouge programs; the clothed and censorious figures in the audience come from an antique photo album in my collection, also rephotographed. The naked performers nest in the repetitive movements of their dance, echo becoming embrace.
Ruins By Night

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
18x24”
Photo courtesy of artist
$1,000
Classical statues stand superimposed across tumbling blocks and bands. The collaged faces layered above and among them suggest a wanderer coming across these stone figures by night and feeling the vertigo of the past that they imply. Eyes like fireflies flit and wink on blurts of gold, watching the stranger’s intrusion.
November

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
12x16.5”
Photo courtesy of artist
Sold
Crows drawn (in white paint pen) and photo-transferred over whorls of collage, over gold, over fragmentary transferred faces and wandering figures—this image is haunted by the memory of lost autumns, and by that shared atmosphere that makes all autumns run together.
Suture

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
12x16.5”
Photo courtesy of artist
Sold
A young Victorian woman, diagrammed like a cow in a butcher’s shop; a young man with three sets of arms, illustrating a movement in an exercise manual; a little girl whose confrontational stare nests in white lace: all are among the ghosts stitched together here. Their skins are mottled by the acrylic monoprinting behind them, which gives them an appearance of decay. In their immateriality these ghosts overlap and tangle together, unable to claim their individual boundaries.
Niagara

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
12x16.5”
Photo courtesy of artist
$700 - SOLD
Another piece inspired by my research for PROJECTIONS. The image shows the Great Blondin, a mid-nineteenth century funambulist who repeatedly crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope, with no net or line; he added progressively more bizarre and terrifying flourishes in each performance, including carrying his manager on his back. The faces of his audience loom large, or perhaps the waters churning below him are invested or infested with personhood. Blondin’s first crossing of Niagara features in the novel as well.
The Empty Room

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
12x16.5”
Photo courtesy of artist
$700
I envisioned a middle-class Victorian woman opening the door of an unused room, and finding a maelstrom of levitating furniture and books with ghosts tumbling among them. The double-headed standing figure looks back at her with recognition, mirror and stranger at once. After she cowers back and slams the door, that gaze will stay with her.
Illumination

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
11x14”
Photo courtesy of artist
$600 - SOLD
A little girl sits enclosed in a lightbulb. Electric light prickles from her body, and she is surrounded by figures of a future she can hardly imagine. A mountain climber scales the slippery glass and the daughter of an astronaut swings on the pull chain. A beetle clings to the outside of her tiny home. In the blaze of her own light, the girl sees none of them.
Divers

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
11x14”
Photo courtesy of artist
Sold

A doubled woman dives through the ceiling of a quiet room, while a smaller diver tries to escape out the window. The floor will yield to the divers, and they will continue to plunge through the rooms below, then the house’s foundation, then the Earth’s mantle. They will swim at last in magma, quite unharmed.
Rabbit Sleeps On Bones

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
11x14”
Photo courtesy of artist
Sold
The first of the mixed-media works. A white ink rabbit curls on bones photographed in museums and in my own collection; the layers of death beneath her are her native ground, comfortable and comforting. Two carousel rabbits leap above, never suspecting that they are alienated from both death and life.
Sleepwalker

Sarah Porter, 2023
Mixed media on paper
11x14”
Photo courtesy of artist
$600
A figure walks on the roof of a ruined house, multiplying through her own unconscious wanderings. A rain of words is falling, but the sleepwalker doesn’t feel them. She is balanced on the roof’s narrow ridge and may slip at any moment—unless she is already dead.