Open Studio
Saturday, July 20, 2025
2-6pm
Meaning slips, meets correction, mistranslates, doubles back—and becomes something else entirely.
The works on view are part of an evolving body of work investigating the tension between legibility and rupture—between the known and the obscured—through drawing, writing, and material collage. Text fragments are layered, lifted, erased, and recontextualized: bureaucratic forms, pharmacy scripts, institutional procedures, devotional incantations, personal reminders. Rendered on translucent vellum, these pages become palimpsests—layered records of thought, gesture, interruption, and care.
Some works feature appropriated images—news media, public monuments, historic ornament—repositioned as devotional or protective icons. Others reflect a daily rhythm of accumulation and loss: studio notes, to-do lists, headlines, overheard phrases. Iridescent washes and oil glazes obscure, soften, or destabilize the text’s authority. Staples, tape, and fingerprint marks leave their own trace histories.
This body of work follows an earlier series on black craft paper that engaged with the effects of trauma, spectacle, and a kind of industrialized repetition. Those works—several of which are also on view—emerged during periods of personal and collective instability and continue to inform my approach to surface, repetition, and refusal.
Recent conversations with friends whose shared language is not native to any of us have shaped this new series in subtle and lasting ways. The dislocation of meaning—of operating in translation or partial comprehension—has become a generative space: a place where ambiguity opens the possibility of new connections, and where language becomes texture as much as emotive and conceptual communication.
This is not a gallery. It is a working studio. A den. A space for unpolished thinking, provisional combinations, and quiet refusal. Many of these works came together through ordinary time: reading, parenting, disappointment, chores, observation, and dreams. They are still forming. They are open.
Sarah Butler
New York, 2025
In-progress and recent work on view. Visitors welcome.