Study for a Scene

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Study for a Scene, a solo exhibition of new work by Sara Stern in our Main Gallery, curated by OyG co-director Adam Liam Rose. Stern presents a moving image installation filmed with cast glass, stop motion, and mime. "Many thought that it was a simple scene. That the blame was clearly on the glass, the window that played tricks on the bird, the glass who pretended to be the sky. But the window had, for a moment, been the bird, when the bird in the sky became the bird in the glass. The window felt shattered. A glass feather floated down and away and up and over the city. I'm the victim, said the window. And the people watched. They were in the theater. The glass was a scrim. And the glass was caught in a loop, the bird’s doppelgänger cemented there. A loop from mirror to water to mirror again. A loop because the glass was always moving. A loop because the glass was Janus." Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Her recent projects prod histories of urban development with animacy and speculative fiction. She has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including Sculpture Center (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, NY), The Jewish Museum (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA: the Visual Arts Fellowship, an LGBTQ+ Returning Fellows Residency, and the Stephen & Palmina Pace Residency. In recent years, Stern has participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (Cherry Grove, Fire Island, NY), the Oberhausen Seminar, the Art & Law Program, the Artist Residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (West Rutland, VT), and the Object Movement Residency at The Center at West Park (New York, NY).