Spotlight: Sarah Cain

SEPTEMBER 13-OCTOBER 26, 2024

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Sarah Cain’s Path of Totality, 2024. A text by curator and writer Jamillah James accompanies the presentation.

From Where You Stand: On Sarah Cain’s Path of Totality
By Jamillah James

One of many things that comes to mind when thinking of Los Angeles, where artist Sarah Cain has called home for years, is the manner in which the sky envelopes the landscape—at dusk, when the horizon melts into strains of warm pinks and golds as the day transitions into night; the searing whiteness of the midday sun—its warmth, its bite, and tenacity; and the canopy of violets that slowly recede to blues of different temperatures when another day begins, in a place where seasons are indiscernible from one to the next.

In recent years, Cain’s work has become increasingly monumental, forging its own landscape. Major works, like her remarkably complex projects in stained glass or her massive painting-installations that encompass seemingly infinite expanses of wall and floor with exploded color and line, show the artist taking up space—holding ground against and atop received, outmoded histories, or just plain boring mythologies of painting as a practice. Taking up space is radical—it is how you are seen, felt, and heard. At their very core, Cain’s abstract paintings are radical and disorienting in the best possible way. Her attack and command of both physical and pictorial space is incisive yet wildly generous, leaving the viewer with no singular place to stand or look. There is no one history from which her paintings pull; her wellspring of influence is a panoply of styles and gestures that intersect in unexpected ways. There is the specter of abstract expressionism, which quickly gets pushed to the margins in favor of other, more discursive trajectories within the historical and emerging canons of painting or artmaking more generally. What immediately comes to mind is the boisterous spirit of Pattern and Decoration, the organic sensibilities of the Feminist Art Movement, and the inherently defiant posture of graffiti. Cain’s work is inventively fearless as it establishes its own vernacular at this very point in time, as painting remains both central yet ever contested. Cain is gleefully and thankfully part of its contestation.

Path of Totality (2024) is a new work by Cain which finds the artist indexing familiar gestures in an exciting direction. She continues to embrace materials that have become intrinsic to her work—spray paint, glitter, stringed beads, and rope. The painting contains a host of tensions that are inherent to Cain’s paintings of the past decade: patterns beginning and terminating unexpectedly, shapes that announce themselves boldly in saturated hues yet dissipate into thin streams and drips of diluted paint, hard edges giving way to soft, organic forms and vice versa. The tactility of Cain’s surfaces are an extension of her insistence on having the viewer not just see what is in front of them, but to embrace it with full engagement. There is no wrong way or place to look.

At the painting’s furthest reach is a rectangle in its upper left corner, a discrete painting within the painting. Its edges are framed by two scalloped lines in a complementary orange and blue. These lines abut, propping each other up, but do not complete the perimeter. It is somewhat unclear whether this is the painting’s starting point or if it is the end, placed additively after the rest of the work took shape. Contained within this section are assertive, chunky pink and blue forms fenced in by sprayed squiggle marks that reach beyond the scalloped frame. Try as it might, the rectangle’s geometry cannot hold everything.

Another framing device is the braided rope that cuts through the center of the painting, camouflaged by radiating bands of color, yet clearly demarcating one side from the other. The braid defects from matching its surroundings at its ends—where it starts, with a knot resting on the top of the painting, as if this were the point where it is held up to the wall, and at the bottom, where it is dipped in day-glo orange paint and rests against four contiguous circular forms. It is these moments where the surface reveals its expansive intentions, something as slight as a braid asserting itself into real space.

The title of the work is a term relating to the space in which a solar eclipse is fully visible, that is when the moon completely covers the sun. At the right of the painting is a sphere cloaked in silver leaf, its shimmer recalling the cool glow of the moon, while the wavering lines coming from its center evoke the bathing darkness of an eclipse. However, Cain’s eclipse is in marvelous color. This introduction of a metallic breaks the picture plane which is dominated by intensely saturated color in all directions. While a comparatively small gesture within this large format canvas, it is a grounding force, the most sharply defined form within the painting. As Cain’s emanating lines ease their way toward the viewer, they sometimes take a moment to rest. The lower half of the painting has rainbow-like arches that crest and then relax at the edge of the painting. This, as well as the soft scratchiness of the muted gray, white, and pink anchoring a slightly skewed center, is yet another departure from expectation within the painting. While there are moments of pause in Path of Totality, the viewer does have their work cut out for them while viewing. Cain is a generous painter whose dynamic work is always full of surprises. Painting is not always the friendliest form. It is enshrined, calcified even, in its idiosyncrasies, secrets, and exclusions. Though, in the case of Path of Totality and Cain’s work more broadly, we stand in the path of her brilliant gestures and dexterous exchange of ideas. Expectations are defied, tradition is yesterday’s concern, and with each new day, there is a new horizon to see and feel.

About:

Sarah Cain (b. 1979, Albany, New York) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Cain earned her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA in 2001. She earned her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include Day after day on this beautiful stage,  Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2023); hand in hand, Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2022); My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2021), and In Nature, Momentary, Bentonville, AR; among others. Cain attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, in 2006. Her work forms part of numerous public collections, including National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Stanford Health Center, Palo Alto, CA; among others. 

Jamillah James is Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was co-curator (with Margot Norton) of Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial at the New Museum, New York. From 2016-2022, James was Curator (then Senior Curator) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), where she curated solo and group exhibitions and organized the local presentations of several touring exhibitions, with an emphasis on women and BIPOC artists. Previously, she was Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, organizing exhibitions at the museum and Art + Practice, Leimert Park; and held curatorial positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Queens Museum, New York, in addition to producing exhibitions and programs at various alternative and artist-run spaces throughout the US and Canada. James is the recipient of the Noah Davis Prize from the Underground Museum, Los Angeles and Chanel Culture Fund (2021), a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021), and a Curatorial Fellowship from the VIA Art Foundation (2018). She has contributed to Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, The International Review of African American Art; numerous institutional exhibition catalogues; and regularly lectures on contemporary art, curating, and professional development for emerging artists.

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