Sarah Canfield is an artist known for merging painting and digital photography to create works in multiple media that cross boundaries between photorealism and abstraction. Her paintings, collages, mixed media works and wall hung sculptures have been exhibited in venues including the Montclair Art Museum, the Morris Museum, the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania State Museum, and the Woodmere Art Museum. Canfield holds a BFA in painting, cum laude, from Alfred University she is an instructor at the Montclair Art Museum and Union College in New Jersey. She has given guest lectures at Newark Academy, Caldwell University and Pratt Institute and she is the recipient of a 2022 Fellowship in Painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her art has been featured in the Quiet Lunch, ANTE curatorial and Art Spiel art blogs, as well as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times. She has a studio in Manufacturers Village in East Orange New Jersey.
Artist Statement
Using the visual tension between photorealism and abstraction, my work investigates dissonances between the technological and the natural worlds. Each work begins with my photographs of electronic, mechanical and natural objects that I abstract in various ways. I alter the photographic prints physically through adding and removing ink and paint, then scan, manipulate and digitally collage the results. These altered digital images become the source material for my work spanning a wide range of media including collages, paintings, pastels, wall hung sculptures and video projections. Using a variety of techniques offers me a means to speak in multiple visual languages at once. These languages are tools in my drive to create ambiguous visual environments that reverberate between reality and illusion.
I assemble my sculptures by stacking layers of transparent, inkjet pigment prints that I mount to plexiglass. Instead of relying on a single printed image, I stack multiple layers of transparent images that optically merge, creating an illusion of deep space. In my video pieces, I project moving images over still works on paper to show the play of the permanent with the ephemeral. In my paintings, pastels and mixed media works, I merge my altered digital photographs with traditional painting and drawing media. Painting, drawing, ripping, gluing and constructing balances out the quiet, still time I spend manipulating images on my computer screen. Wrestling with physical art materials wakes me from the hypnotic draw of the screen.
Merging photographic and painted imagery allows me to create visual and felt contradictions, similar to the seemingly irreconcilable but real relationship between being the actor in and the observer of vivid dreams. The fusion of natural and artificial images in my work is an echo of and commentary on the growing encroachment of technology into the ever-fading natural world. The depth of my sculptural work speaks to how deeply embedded technology has become in our lives and reflects my ongoing fascination with our ever-evolving human relationship with the machine.