Trompe L’oeil With a Touch of BDSM

I have wanted to see Sarah Palmer’s work ever since I discovered it in 2019, with her debut solo show, Outs & Ins, at Mrs. (November 16, 2019–January 18, 2020), which I didn’t get to. I made it to her second exhibition, The Delirious Sun at Mrs. (March 11–May 6, 2023), but not until the last week of the show. This prompted me to do something I rarely do: I got in touch with Palmer — whom I did not know — and arranged a studio visit at her gallery. 

Once I saw the work, I realized that what had caught my attention were the various ways she introduced and deployed spatial relationships in her photographic tableaux. Derived from a variety of photographic sources, ranging from BDSM and style magazines to rephotographed images to original photographs from road trips, Palmer synthesizes images, while treating photographs as visceral things, attached to or resting on a larger surface, on which they cast their shadow. 

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While she is clearly interested in the objectifying gazes that are developed and refined by a consumerist, patriarchal society, her juxtapositions, lurid color, and approach to scale move her work beyond the dry didacticism of earlier conceptual photographers and collagists, such as Martha Rosler and Sarah Charlesworth, with whom she studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York, after earning her BFA at Vassar. 

The traces of narrative that I could tease out from the jpegs I saw of Palmer’s work did not quite cohere, nor did they dissipate with time, which intrigued me enough to contact her. In “age of earth and us all chattering” (2022), ads for BDSM hoods and head harnesses are affixed with strips of magenta tape to a view of a mountainous desert. A perimeter of larger photographs encircles smaller ones. Some of the ads are orange-red, while the others are the grayscale typical of cheaply printed catalogues.

Sarah Palmer, “age of earth and us all chattering” (2022), dye sublimation print on aluminum, 26 1/4 x 32 inches

By arranging the images with an eye to their size and placement, Palmer establishes different tensions between the layered space of the bondage photographs, their cast shadows, and the spatiality of the desert. Viewers discover possible meanings by recognizing the different kinds of layering and juxtapositions they encounter in this and other works by the artist. I say “possible” because Palmer’s art resists any reductive reading, leaving viewers to speculate and reflect upon it. 

What does it mean to adhere ads picturing masked and hooded heads of men and women, often with tubes controlling their air intake, to a desert vista? What is Palmer’s comment on breathing, control, and access? Is she inviting viewers to imagine something about the potentially fictive person who “taped” these images to the desert view. While the juxtaposition between controlled breathing and open desert is apparent, how the viewer connects is more open ended. By suggesting that “age of earth and us all chattering” could be a found artifact or record of someone’s life, Palmer folds another level of speculation into the work. 

This disorienting feeling is also true of “Hours Filled with Distance” (2023), which presents a slightly angled, layered view of photographs and magazine images lying on a large image that is the same size as the ground. By making layered images in which photographs are “things,” Palmer connects her work to the trompe l’oeil tradition of figure/ground reversals that includes John F. Peto, René Magritte, and Jasper Johns. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco website describes Peto’s hyperrealist painting “The Cup We All Race 4” (1900) as “a visual rebus that goes beyond representation to question the boundaries between reality and illusion.”

Sarah Palmer, “Hours Filled with Distance” (2021), dye sublimation print on aluminum, 27 x 32 1/2 inches

By documenting actual photographs lying on a larger image, Palmer melds a formal device of trompe l’oeil with her content, which largely relates to the objectification of women and how women choose to present or stage themselves. What is the relationship between objectification and presentations? Without reaching any fixed conclusions, the artist explores the different ways women are presented or present themselves in both mainstream and underground media and outlets, from widely distributed images to her own photographs.

In the pink-framed “Hours Filled with Distance,” photographs and a magazine spread are scattered atop a pattern of dragonfruit, which signifies the power of transformation. The magazine spread shows a man kissing the neck of a bare-breasted woman. Next to them is a sunken whirlpool filled with red water, in which a nude woman rests. The photographs, depicting women who are nude or in lingerie, are largely different shades of red and orange, in contrast to the man’s blue suit and the background of the magazine image — a night view of a distant urban landscape, suggesting Los Angeles seen from the Hollywood Hills. 

The works are unsettling as their spaces pull us in, encouraging us to move around within this fictive/actual space and consider the juxtapositions and connections. What connects the disparate images and things is the sense that we are constantly immersed in and surrounded by reproducible images that serve as a form of marketing. What do we buy and what do we buy into?

Sarah Palmer, “Every Shadow (Fingers bleeding)” (2021), dye sublimation print on aluminum, 37 1/2 x 25 inches

Source: Hyperallergic.com

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