Tracing a dead landscape
the Argo Annex, Athens, Greece
October- November 2025
(solo exhibition)
|
|
In this multimedia exhibition, Sara Rosenthal unpacks the devastation of the enormous wildfires which consumed her childhood home and hometown in Los Angeles in January of this year. By considering the fallout of this devastation through both archaeological and alchemical thinking, the artist seeks to understand how distinct layers of time can coexist in one location, and how immense forces transform material and landscape, leaving echoes and scars. With a poetic eye towards material and metaphor, the artist casts a wide lens, seeking connections and symbols within construction materials, assemblages of sketches on transparent paper, traced Google maps, distorted furniture sculptures, deconstructed tapestries, and images of uncategorized historical gravestones. The central installation displays personal archival materials from the artist’s burnt home and home video collections.
Simultaneously intimate and monumental, the works on display uncover new understandings of traumatic fallout, whilst extending beyond the constraints of grief to seek “alchemical gold” - a metamorphosed landscape hastening a metamorphosed understanding of history and self. Inspired by diverse texts from Annie Ernaux, Carolyn Forché, and Julia Kristeva, the artist literally ‘traces’ a charred landscape, raising profound questions in the process: “What happens when time collapses?” “Is this something?” “...and what remains?”
Simultaneously intimate and monumental, the works on display uncover new understandings of traumatic fallout, whilst extending beyond the constraints of grief to seek “alchemical gold” - a metamorphosed landscape hastening a metamorphosed understanding of history and self. Inspired by diverse texts from Annie Ernaux, Carolyn Forché, and Julia Kristeva, the artist literally ‘traces’ a charred landscape, raising profound questions in the process: “What happens when time collapses?” “Is this something?” “...and what remains?”
