Opening on Friday 25.2. 5pm
The Color of Water is an investigation of one of our life sustaining elements: water. What is the color of water? The answer is part science and part emotion; yet the answer is elusive and shifting. Through the dual processes of examining gradations of color and gradations of emotion, Schorr follows the ephemeral refractions of light and mood in water.
At dusk and dawn, colors fluctuate into metallic, iridescent hues. Along the coast, the angle of illumination shifts. Colors stimulate mood; water becomes reflection. In 1814, Abraham Werner published a nomenclature organizing color around minerals to make a “standard.” extending these charts to metallics, Sarah Schorr opens the grid to the infinite task of charting the ephemeral emotion in color. The question becomes: how does the heart tint the lens and complicate the standard?
The exhibition opens up with you are not broken: quilt of twilights a collection of colors. Schorr started collecting, sending, and exchanging twilight colors with loved ones at the beginning of the pandemic in order to linger on daily beauty. The work is seen at the gallery as a mosaic that takes the viewer to twilight.
In this exhibition we will see the Algorithmic sea, an interactive art work where visitors can participate. The work evolves during the exhibition and creates a communal vision of the color of the sea. The color of Water publication is also part of the exhibition. It is an investigation of the colors of water. Is it opaque, transparent or translucent? Entering water can delineate both a physical passage and a metaphysical pathway. Silver to black to emerald green: water is often not blue. Sometimes the sea is a rolling red from deep sea algae. Assisted by the waterscape, these transitions open us to different reflective experiences, sparking introspection about attention, physicality, and mobility in our media-saturated landscape.
Through photographing paint drying (yes, literally, paint drying), I invite the eye into the impermanence of the materials. recording the pigment of paint curling within the water, I depict liquid as it bleeds into the fiber of paper. These drops of paint are transforming; this color impermanence echoes how photographic instruments of photographic capture are always evolving.
-Sarah Schorr, Aarhus, Denmark 2021