Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to announce freedom is a prime number, Sarah Cain’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.
Some things about Sarah Cain:
1) Sarah Cain enjoys doing things the wrong way, always starting out with a mistake, an accident, an errant line, an unruly string, an ugly shirt, illegible graffiti, a drunken pattern, a counterfeit pimp’s horde of fake gold chain, etc. Like a radiating galaxy, they spiral a cosmos worth of color and line around that first mistake. It’s not rebellious exactly, or chaotic even, just fuck-ups are always more interesting. Sublimity, according to this and that scholar, is achieved through the destruction of order. Nowhere better to start than a mistake.
2) “freedom is a prime number” is a story best left unexplained. But though numbers are pure order (mathematics often mistaken for a language without ambiguity), prime numbers have no pattern or logic. They are wild and unbroken. Divisible only by one and itself.
3) Important to note: physical space is psychological space.
4) Abstraction may free us from representation, but it doesn’t free us from reality, even a fever dream is just reality boiled over. It’s delusions and phantasms are very real.
5) The hard-edged abstractions of Frank Stella warp and bend, the semiotics of Ree Morton shudder under splashes of iridescence, the popular rhythms and crafty appreciations of Mary Heilman suffuse a broken picture plane, all attempted with the spiritual seriousness of Imi Knoebel and the subtleties of Richard Tuttle. Does Sarah Cain love Cy Twombly? She does.
6) Sometimes Sarah Cain’s canvases stretch into the space, sometimes space penetrates into the canvas. Bones are revealed, colors leak out all over the floor, a prismatic spirit writhes all over the room. It can get messy. Form dissolving into formlessness and back again.
7) These paintings are spirited. Interpret that however you want to.
Sarah Cain lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; and the Imperial Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna, Austria, among other national and international institutions. Cain’s work was also included in A Tale of Two Cities: Busan-Seoul/Seoul-Busan, Busan Biennale 2006, Busan, Korea; the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; and Made in LA 2012, the first Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART, Los Angeles, CA. In 2006, she received the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sarah Cain, the artist’s first monograph, was recently published by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), July 2012.
