About the Artist
Sara Graham studied at University of Guelph (MFA, 2006) and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA, 1997).
She has produced a collection of diverse bodies of work that share a concern with the images, issues and ideas that surround and make up the cities we live in or those that we imagine. She maintains an ongoing interest in how people and communities shape and are shaped by the numerous systems and networks within the everyday lives of cities, in how people move within and around cities and especially in the visible and invisible infrastructure that lie, below, above and behind the built and unbuilt forms that together create urban environments.
Her works have been exhibited wide across Canada and recently has been featured in exhibitions at the Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey), MKG (Toronto), CAFKA.14 (Kitchener-Waterloo), Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (Grande Prairie), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Kitchener), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown), The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery
(St John’s), and Nuit Blanche (Toronto).
About the Works
Generator is a new body of photographic work by Vancouver artist Sara Graham. Generator is inspired by British architect Cedric Price’s Generator (1976-1980), an unexecuted architectural project for Yulee, Florida that he conceived as a place to work, to create, to think, and to stare. The design called for timber-framed structures with variable infill panels and cladding, along with screens, placed upon concrete by computerized cranes pads according to users' requirements and desires. The buildings would learn and adapt. An unlearning building was an unchanging building and therefore was a boring building. As people changed, they changed the buildings as the buildings changed the people, that were changing the buildings.
Graham’s Generator series follows Price’s through her adaptation of the adaptable architectural frameworks of his Generator. She has produced her own imagined structures represented in a seemingly endless number of photographic configurations. Each large format photograph pushes towards abstraction as the architectural structure reveals itself within and between the collection of different configurations across the series. Each photograph operates between the real intangibilities of architectural and photographic space and time and real realities of photographic and architectural form.
