Sarah Brent
Installation, sculpture, and painting, is there anything Sarah Meyers Brant can’t do?! I (Lisa) spent half of my time at college painting abstracted images of decaying fruit, naturally I am attracted to her paintings of wilting flowers and sculptures made of various debris!
Born in Hadley, NY, Sarah Meyers Brent received her BFA from Skidmore College, her Post- Baccalaureate in Studio Art from Brandeis University, and her MFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire. The artist maintains a studio at Waltham Mills Artist Association in Waltham, MA.
Brent was featured as a 2016 Best of Boston artist by The Improper Bostonian and received the Fay Chandler Emerging Artist Award that same year. Twice resident at the Vermont Studio Center, Brent has also been a recipient of an Artist Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, who designated her a 25 at 25 Fellow. She was also featured in Volume 16 of New American Painting Northeast edition.
Represented by the Chase Young Gallery in Boston, Brent has exhibited widely. Her solo exhibition Seep, Spill, Grow appeared at Danforth Art Museum along with her recent exhibit Beautiful Mess at Kelley Stelling Contemporary. Reviews of her numerous exhibitions have appeared in Artscope Magazine, Art New England, the Boston Globe, Sculpture Magazine and other publications. Her work is in the permanent collections of Danforth Art Museum/School, Liquitex Corporation, and in numerous private collections.
She explains her work further:
I make mixed media works to take the craziness of motherhood (and life in general) and to create something beautiful out of it. My installations use all of the debris from my house and studio, including old kids’ clothes, paint globs, packing peanuts, rags, pieces of old projects, and gloves. There is a beautiful richness to these materials, which are otherwise considered trash. I want the work to feel alive: simultaneously growing and decaying. I incorporate the fabric and debris with dirt and other natural elements.
Although I am not an artist who has mapped out the meaning of my work ahead of time, I bring to it whatever I am thinking about, including feelings surrounding motherhood, concerns about the political climate, and fears regarding the destruction of the environment. My work is often in contrast to a geometric structure, sometimes the clean edge of a gallery wall or a canvas frame.
I started out as a painter but am now also branched out into installation, sculpture, and mixed media work. My paintings of decaying flowers and plants similarly drip and wilt. I believe that I bring the sensibility of a painter to my more sculptural works. I am able to use my artistic process to work through the mess of life, and ultimately arrive at a form —simultaneously growing and decaying—that I find really beautiful.
Find more of her work online at here Instagram Facebook and Twitter
Originally published 8/2/2019
More on the blog:
