University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

The lecture will be followed by an exhibtion reception for Sarah Nance: "for evaporated seas" in the Laverne Krause Gallery.

Nance creates shrouds for “archived” landscapes—environments, such as former inland seas, that are now observable only through fossil records, artifacts, or recorded data. These shrouds vary from handworked textiles to experimental vocal performances and, when installed on site, become surface layers that point to complex records of deep time. In her most recent work, Nance focuses on the complex visual experience of shininess and its ability to disorient and obscure. She considers the mirage in particular, as a phenomenon that creates slippages in a landscape’s boundaries in time and space. 

Sarah Nance (MFA, '13)  is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative terrains. Her time spent living in the geologies of Oregon, Iceland, eastern Canada, and the Driftless Area of the Midwest has been significant in the development of her research, much of which continues to be based in these regions. Nance is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Practice in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Binghamton in New York. She has previously held professorships in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S.

This lecture and exhibition are made possible by the Laverne Krause Lectures and Exhibitions endowment.