sarah bricke
1632 / PST

is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher working along the intersections of gender, sexuality, critical theory, and notions of the archive. her process and projects are distilled from the ways in which seemingly disparate landscapes, bodies, and processes are both distinct and inextricably linked, and how these paradoxical relationships are represented, perceived, and preserved through institutional and archival practices.

working through photographic processes, performative lecture, nonlinear narrative, and poetry, she engages in the production of objects and images as a mechanism to facilitate
dialogues around them. she is involved with making as a continual process in which things don’t become fully defined and can’t be considered completely understood or fully realized. bricke’s  work frequently utilizes fragmentary pieces or remains that can be taken apart and reconstructed, transferred into different forms, or become part of new cycles. 

ongoing artistic and research interests concern art that arises in the ruins of the built environment, artistic practitioners who create long-term and/or large-scale work without receiving recognition or institutional support, and those who make work in the face of oppression, disempowerment, or victimization. 

it will be difficult to distinguish the presentation of the work from the work itself.

the work deliberately engages the dissolution of such boundaries.

how is the documentation of the work encountered by the observer?

the work is the presentation of the work - its/it’s representation and replication via this platform.

05 now and then



now and then is concerned with notions of fluidity: considering the nature of gaps, flow, and fluidity in the archive and in art making; the life and work of an artist engaged in a sustained photographic practice at the river’s edge and at the fluid edges of society’s margins, and with a fluid movement between works of scholarly and artistic research projects. Rather than attempting to resolve or create a container or chain of relations, I offer fluid movement as a method of writing, means of artistic production, and an element of knowledge synthesis where estuaries are noted as ever moving states of attention. In the absences between clear answers and in the spaces that surround verifiable truths, we might focus on the formulation of interesting questions: perhaps there is something profound to be understood by acknowledging that there is always more information that we simply may never have.















The title now and then references the project’s relationship with notions of time and temporality, troubling the notion of linear time and engaging a sort of temporal fluidity by approaching the work of the artist as both an academic research project and a visual/textual/performative cross-temporal collaboration.

Among the pathways to and from the work and life of Baltrop are points of intersection and departure for further considerations of multiple other methodologies themes, and topics, including: archives and archival practices generally, artist’s archives specifically, cross-temporal collaboration, artistic and conventional research methodologies and how they may entwine, themes and depictions of sexuality and gender (especially in connection with the subject matter of the work), the importance of the site in such work, and how these sites are represented in art and in the archive, and nonlinear narrative, electronic literature, and performative lecture as less conventional means by which research may be given artistic form, discussion may be instigated, and information may be disseminated.


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3912—21/45  quis custodiet ipsos custodes