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Portfolio
Paintings of Sarah Trigg
Sarah Trigg’s paintings, made with both traditonal and digital
media, explore the connection between geography and biology.
Text by Karen E. Steen
April 2004
A directory of fast-food restaurants in the Detroit Metro Airport; a map
of Sprint’s cell-phone service across the United States; the grid
of Northwest Airlines’ flight patterns: all of these are organic
systems that developed in response to need and efficiency, much like the
systems within the human body. To painter Sarah Trigg, these urban
patterns even look a little like cells, dendrites, and organs.
Taking inspiration from secondhand surgery textbooks, airport layouts,
and fuzzy aerial photos found on the Web, Trigg maps fictive terrains
that are part landscape, part bodyscape. “The way I construct my
image is always related to the body in some way,” she says. “I
want it to have this feeling that you’re observing something in
motion—processes going on. Our architecture is somewhat similar.
Our movement and daily action mimic how a cell might function.”
Working loosely from her growing collection of found photos and
illustrations, Trigg strives to capture “how one’s
subconscious might contend with the original images...how they are
filtering through our memory. The intent is not so much to be
representational but to reflect how you would remember that photograph,
or how your subconscious might regurgitate that image.” Her
“Metastatic Explorer” series began with a map of early Native
American tribe territories and languages from The National Atlas of
the United States of America. On top of that she layered the routes
of European explorers from the 1600s through the 1800s. “The idea
was to get a sample, like a doctor would biopsy a tissue, of several
systems that were developing in the United States around that
time,” Trigg says. “I found it interesting that the explorer
system seemed to develop with no regard to the forms of the Native
American system—despite having to contend with the same geography.
And eventually the explorer system caused the Native American system to
change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal
cells.” |
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