Hello All,


I am happy to announce my work will be exhibited in three upcoming gallery shows. The openings are as follows:





1. The Portrait Show,  12609 Hawthorne Blvd, Hawthorne, CA 90250
Saturday July 30th, 6-10 PM 

2. Play, LAMAG at the Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90027
Sunday August 14th, 2- 5 PM

3. Recombinant Poetics, Arena One Gallery at the Santa Monica Airport, 3026 Aiport Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90405
Thursday August 25th, 7-10 PM (I will be curating this group show, featuring performance and mixed media arts)

Hope to see you all there.

With love,

Sara True

So honored to have participated in 49 Days: Women Who Count, an immersive performance art/ contemporary dance piece. Tonight's performance at Arena One Gallery in Santa Monica was full of heart and soul. 


​
LA Weekly Synopsis: 
http://www.laweekly.com/event/49-days-women-who-count-6756632

http://www.performingartslive.com/events/49-days-women-who-count-arena-1-gallery

I am both proud and humbled to share that I will be presenting at the 5th Annual ucLADINO Judeo-Spanish Symposium: Networks, Relationships, and Zones of Contact at UCLA this March. My focus this time will be moving away from Kristeva and the duende and towards the Jewish roots of flamenco. 

Olé! Maybe now I will finally get myself al clase del baile flamenco.... 

​

object experimentation, with childhood mementos: 

food for thought, in words, of late:

In town for the Kristeva Circle Conference, where I'll be presenting on flamenco, the duende, and Kristeva's semiotic chora and abjection. 

In the meantime, though, this:

Memphis 

bugs buzz in the streetlights and i'm walking, walking far, i buzz buzz too.
two dollars for a soup bowl hot tamale hot wings in a paper thin buzzcut
razor’s edge and it’s ten o clock somewhere where i be
two chicken wings, 69 cents with that old school sign, that old kind
hey y’all know where i kin git some o dat yee thank yew baybee
hair piled so high atop the head and sprigs out-pfoof! up flouncing
pleshette is a nice kind of name and i didn’t know her but she died her for not too long
moths too the flame, you can see them swirling in them streetlights
cicadas, crickets, junebugs, some other bugs
i drip sweat, walked on far, train rumbles slow and scares me some when a truck stops by hey pretty lady yew want a ride? no thanks i like walking
(not now i don’t drip sweat drag tired feet)
yer gon’ walk? yew got quite a walk ahead’a ya
i know i didn’t know i knew i knewed it
looks like yew got some pretty comfrtable shoes
what?
looks like yew got some pretty comfrtble shoes
what?!
looks like yew got some pretty comfrtble shoes

i can’t hear you the train is too loud!
aw yew kin just leave that honey, but bring the coins up here
we’re talkin waffles 24 hours but only when the door’s thrown
spider the size o my hand
dew that sits, kissed, sweet spectre outta shakespeare come to take me to the holy land: two thousand fifteen is HIS year sign says
move on then, plastic doggie and the reals with solemn eyes
junebug!
more frightnin then the men
juuune
bug
spider the size o my hand
and i’m not kiddin y’all
i buzz i
buzz
i

From Venizia to Venice Beach, the art continues....

Now back in California, and planning to stick around for awhile, my art finally gets a chance to breathe. I have been traveling so much, my paintings have been stuck in the house like housed puppies. It was nice to let them swing (there was a vicious wind!) at the Venice Neighborhood Council annual festival and then at Venice's CicLAvia. (Streets shut down, bikes out en masse)

Meanwhile, in the studio, mucho amarillo. Working on a series inspired by sunflowers: those grotesque beauties with their phallic stalks and furry disks, curved domes the epitome of abjection in that hearty yellow that has consumed so much sun... Bataille yellow,  and Van Gogh ochre. So many ways to see one subject, the possibilities are interminable. No wonder Morandi spent his whole life on one subject (bottles). 

And the Magic Theater Collective will have its first official collectivized performance at the Venice Afterburn Decompression Art Crawl in September! A rough draft preview version of our forthcoming absurdist opera, IN GLORY of EXCESS!!!!!

Photos to come sometime soon, as well as updated painting section (all the 2015s!)

Have a lazy day! It is, after all, the dog days of summer. Time to make tamales, sweat, bask, lounge. But first, to swim in big mama ocean. 

Ciao!

the most amazing thing about the biennale is that, like avignon or edinburgh during a theater festival, the city itself becomes host to the event, producing unexpected delights outside of the official areas. 


wandering into random old buildings overlooking the canals, i encountered surreal South Pacific costumed and masked actors in alluring twisted videos and photos (Never Say Goodbye by Wu Tien-Chang), beautifully mysterious plasticine and wood sculptures in a park (Ursula von Rydingsvard), an exhibit by 20 artists from Los Angeles, mythological nature photographs by Helen Sear (...the Rest is Smoke), and, my favorite, Inverso Mundus, by AES+F- a video projection in a long long tunnel-type building on 3 huge screens depicting a world turned topsy turvy. set to dramatic classical music, police and street kids caressed each other, children boxed with the elderly, women in high heels and couture erotically imprisoned sexualized men... bizarre and fascinating and determined to present itself as it was, with no apologies. 

There were so many events (hundreds) hidden like so many treasure map gems throughout the floating city among its tantalizing misty canals, enticing in the heat- it would have taken years to find them all. I'm glad I had two days.

*None of the Biennale photos are mine*

Ursual von Rydingsvard summed up best what I felt from All the World's Futures: 
"Walking through the Arsenale, there’s a wanting and a pain about the state of the world. We’re all at a loss about what to do with the world."

two very full days wandering venice's ghostly canals, among beautiful buildings past vendors hawking masks and hats and other tourist wares brought me to The World Of Art, enshrined in the pavilions of the Venice Biennale. Overly political, All the World's Futures (this year's theme) aims to be "a Parliament of Forms", exposing the "contemporary global reality"- "a stage where historical and counter-historical projects will be explored". 

I think Okwui Enwezor, curator, succeeded. The compilation showcased in All the World's Futures (the international pavilions were a separate affair) had me mulling over the following:

-What does it mean to insert the Real in a public space?
-Is the function of art to puncture the bubble of consumerist gluttony/ heteronormative society? To inform? To shock? To uplift? or to inflict wounds, express anger, perhaps even heal?
-What are the functions of international expositions, and what does it mean to view art about torture and oppression among Venice's sunny canals, most of us tourist- spectators?
-How about the art railing against capitalism/consumerism while being housed in a corporate/capitalist endeavor- the official setting of biennale? Does hypocrisy make it wrong? Negate the meaning?


Marx was highly present; there were video pieces presenting lectures and analyses of his works and throughout the event Das Kapital was enacted in live readings. Contemporary global issues were revealed and hit home; human suffering, poverty, oppression, disease, injustice, corruption were prevalent themes. The exhibits at the Giardini and Arsenale forums were certainly intellectually provocative, but I couldn't help wondering where the feeling was? The whole effect was of a college periodical, in fact, a radical newspaper with each individual having his or her say, but generally agreeing upon the basic principles. It felt a little dated. 

pieces featuring video/ sound/ physical immersion in a space/ color/ humor/ irony/ poetry/ excess appealed most to me. 

Standouts from All the World's Futures included:

Walead Beshty's wonderfully messy sculptures

Mika Rottenberg's bizarre video installation taking on factory workers, bodies, pearls...and sneezing spaghetti...

Lavar Munroe's paint/ collages

Lili Reynaud Dewar's take on the AIDS epidemic has stuck in my head until now, the repetitive mantra-like opera haunting my mind....

Natalia Pershina Yakimanskaya Gluklya's pretest clothings ('Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin') I have always liked costumes and theatrics...

Sonia Gomes's hanging fabric sculptures (inspiring use of materials)

and, perhaps most influential- life changing even- the film shot by Im Heung-soon depicting the plights of factory workers in Cambodia. 

I don't know if it counts as art technically (the excerpt i saw was straight documentary) but being exposed to that much REALITY definitely made me grateful for the privileged life I lead. 

While gathering research for my Kristeva Circle conference presentation on Flamenco, the Duende, and Kristeva's semiotic chora I had time to visit the Alcazar of Sevilla, where I collected patterns of infinity. (and a double tree, curated to be a reflection of itself)


Research took me from El Centro Andaluz de Flamenco in Jerez de la Frontera to el Centro Flamenco Fosforito en Cordoba to a flamenco hall in Sevilla, where locals laughed and drank and sang and strummed guitars. An old woman encouraged a younger woman, whose voice cracked on the high notes. A man with a big round belly got up to dance, joined by a bartendress there with a flower in her hair. 

And then Granada, where I encountered gypsies wailing in the caves of the Sacromonte, the sacred mountain. They sang to me and beat the guitar and clapped, eyes full of sun and dry grasses, mouths stained tobacco....