Mosaic a multi-media installation by Vermont artist Sage Lewis. Lewis recently completed a Project Space Residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, and a 10-month Artist-in-Residence Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. While in Qatar she set up a darkroom for students to learn analog processes and received a Faculty Research Grant to study and teach the process of carbon printing. The work that Lewis created in Qatar has spurred her current research into space analogs – places on earth that are analogous to other planets. She has taught at The Ohio State University, VCUQatar, and been a visiting artist at Denison University (Granville, OH), College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME), and Hartwick College (Oneonta, NY). Lewis holds an MFA in Painting & Drawing from The Ohio State University and a BFA in Painting and Art History from Maine College of Art. In video, collage, assemblage, and sculpture, Lewis works across media to piece together landscapes from disparate sources, including her own explorations in the deserts of Qatar and Southern California, archival geology specimens, and planetary images transmitted from Mars. In these works, the surface of the earth can be seen as a corollary to surfaces of other planets such as the moon and Mars. These works seem to be asking if the ground, and by extension the space of the image, can connect us to another place and time. “In occasional moments, we are allowed to see across the strata of geologic time, glimpsing parts or patterns that comprise a limitless whole. We can focus in on a fixed point where water becomes desert, or outwards across a cascade of chemical reactions folded into a mountain range. Working backwards from a panoramic view, we can locate the mosaic in image-forms composed of pixels, film grain, fabric weave, and paper structure. Taking this oscillating stance between the absorption of the picture at large and the materiality of imaging processes, Lewis pursues both the sublime, engrossing qualities of landscape alongside the elemental facts of dirt, dust, and stone.” -Sage Lewis.

Artist Talk*: Sage Lewis, 6-7 PM, Thursday, May 13, 2021, *limited attendance, live Zoom and recorded.