Jimena Sarno 
Commons Lab Residency:
October 19 – December 14, 2019

Jimena Sarno | Score for the Near Future
Exhibition | October 19 – December 14, 2019
Reception | November 9, 2019 | 5-8 PM
Culminating Performance | December 12, 2019 | 7-8 PM
Main Gallery | 1639 18th Street, Santa Monica

Jimena Sarno is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and organizer. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and currently living in Los Angeles, her experience as a South American immigrant informs her practice. She works across a range of media including installation, sound, video, text and sculpture. Her practice encompasses research and production as an exploration of power relations, consensus and social control. She is interested in how political constructs become normalized and internalized, shaping how we understand the world and our place in it.

For her Artist Lab exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center, which is also part of 18th Street’s Commons Lab residency, Jimena Sarno is creating a process-based sound and sculpture installation. Score for the Near Future is organized around the idea of dissonance, questioning how space is conceived and navigated based on the viewer’s assumptions of power and representation. Populated by an accumulation of handmade domestic objects that evolves over the run of the exhibition, the gallery is transformed into a three-dimensional musical score where every presence, absence, and spatial relation is readable as both notation and abstraction. This gradual accumulation within the installation will result in a complete visual score that will be interpreted and composed by Sarno’s collaborator, vocal artist and improviser Molly Pease. Through a randomizing process, the score will be electronically re-mixed with the recorded fragments of the composition and played back in the space in intervals, re-articulating harmony and dissonance into infinite new combinations. 

The exhibition opens to the public on October 19th at 18th Street Arts Center’s Main Gallery, and will continue to develop in the gallery space until the exhibition’s reception on November 9, 2019 from 5-8 PM. A live performance of the score by Pease will take place on December 12, 2019 from 7-8 PM. 

As Jimena Sarno’s practice is concerned with labor, manual skills, materials, and learning processes, her residency has focused on learning furniture making, woodworking, and expanding her ceramics skillset as required by the making of the objects in the installation. As an extension of her residency and in conjunction with 18th Street’s ongoing outreach and education partnerships with the local community, Sarno will lead a participatory workshop incorporating ceramics and score mapping with residents of Community Corporation of Santa Monica’s 2602 Broadway flagship property, designed by architects Brooks and Scarpa whose exhibition Dense-City: Housing for Quality of Life and Social Capital is concurrently on view in 18th Street’s Airport Gallery. The resulting collaborative graphic score, created with and for residents of the non-profit affordable housing community, will be gifted to the residents with the intention of being installed on site at a later date.

Sarno’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at LACE, Visitor Welcome Center, Grand Central Art Center, The Museum of Latin American Art, The Mistake Room, Human Resources, PØST, UCI Contemporary Art Center, Control Room, The Luminary, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea de Santiago De Compostela, Fellows of Contemporary Art, and Small Editions among others. She is the recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. She is the organizer of analog dissident, a monthly discussion gathering that features work and work-in-progress by two invited artists.

SUPPORT

Jimena Sarno’s residency and exhibition is generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

18th Street Arts Center’s programs are additionally supported by the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division, the California Arts Council, and our generous community of donors.

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