Sara VanDerBeek

Sara VanDerBeek was born in 1976 and works in the United States. She participated in MoMA’s New Photography 2009, and in 2010 the Whitney Museum presented her first museum solo exhibition, Sara VanDerBeek: To Think of Time. Her practice combines photography, sculpture, found images, studio constructions, and installation.^*1

VanDerBeek’s themes include memory, time, place, scale, sculpture, architectural fragments, art-historical images, collective history, and photography as the trace of temporary constructions. She collects images from art-history books, archives, magazines, newspapers, and other sources, incorporates them into temporary sculptures or studio arrangements, photographs them, and then dismantles them. The photograph is both image and residue; it may be the only surviving evidence of the sculptural object made for the camera.^*1 As the Whitney noted in To Think of Time, she also works outside the studio and meditates on time as both personal and collective. Her practice rests on the question of photography’s power to change how we read scale, time, and place, and on its ability to reveal aspects of experience that are barely perceived.^*2 In a 2000s context where artists were testing photography’s twenty-first-century meaning through sculpture and installation, VanDerBeek’s importance lies in treating photography as a site where memory and collective history are assembled and destabilized.^*4

The Whitney described her quiet, semi-abstract photographs as based on sculptural forms and emphasized the temporary nature of objects built for the camera. MoMA’s New Photography 2009 press release described A Composition for Detroit as responding to a deindustrialized city through references ranging from the 1967 Detroit uprising to Walker Evans. The New Yorker discussed VanDerBeek and related artists as photographing fragile arrangements dense with personal, political, and art-historical references.^*3