Bruce Silverstein Gallery presents Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory, the gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Chitimacha/Choctaw artist Sarah Sense (b. 1980). Comprising more than twenty new photo-weavings made from the artist’s contemporary landscape photographs, archival documents, historical images, maps, printed bamboo and rice papers, cotton thread, ribbon, and hand-prepared rivercane, the exhibition considers the relationship between Indigenous people and ancestral land and the systems of representation, ownership, and erasure that have attempted to sever that connection.
Land is understood not as property but as a living source of knowledge and cultural continuity; working with weaver John Paul Darden, Sense harvested, dyed, and split rivercane for the work. Line examines the borders, names, and legal records imposed through colonial mapping. Blood draws on archival land records documenting the dispossession of Chitimacha and Choctaw homelands in what is now the Southeast United States. Memory weaves archival photographs together with Sense’s own photographs of Tahoe, Sequoia, Redwood, and Yosemite, restoring the presence of the Indigenous communities whose histories remain inseparable from these places.
The exhibition also introduces Sense’s first Tree Weaving Quilt, a new medium in her practice made together with her children.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery