Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR [link]
July 9 – August 24, 2014
Fake fruit, an image of dead Christ and mannequin legs walk into a white cube. Fake fruit asks Curator about the flies: “After all, I’m dead but I’m not rotting.” Mannequin legs asks the silent Christ image to speak. Curator points to a stack of printed microphone images on a light-filled windowsill. But like all other soft-spoken signs, they transmit silence.
Rafferty clothes her quiet, conceptually rich works in seductive, see-through materials. Gaining substance from the underlying architecture, pastel prints on plexi and shadowy images on acetate reflect images of perplexed onlookers scratching their heads and batting at fake flies.
Villem Flusser writes that freedom is the ability to commit suicide, “its availability as an option at any moment – not constant rejection, but the constant possibility of rejecting.” Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s exhibition confronts one with this “constant possibility of rejection.” The pieces linger between ethereal (the consistent transparency of surfaces) and concrete (the forceful puncturing of the surfaces with screws). The pure white space of the gallery aids this liminal state. The work oscillates between presence and absence depending on one’s position in space. The imagery itself feels secondary, arbitrary, suggesting the possibility of infinite permutations that yield the same experience.
