Dreamsong

Evaporated Hours, SaraNoa Mark’s (b. 1991, New York) debut solo exhibition with Dreamsong, borrows its title from the artist’s process of desalinating seawater by collecting buckets from Atlantic Ocean, boiling it down, and allowing it to evaporate, leaving behind only the salt. Presented in a metal basin on the gallery’s floor and paired with limestone slabs watered daily with an erosive vinegar solution, the work Evaporated Hours (2025) is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s twin preoccupations: the creation of meaning through the enactment of ritual and the physical transformation of material and landscape by the passage of time. Using gestural and material decisions that directly align with their conceptual concerns, Mark synthesizes references as discreet as Seljuk architecture, Assyrian palace reliefs, Talmudic typesetting, and Robert Smithson’s land art into a sculptural practice evocative of the ruins and remnants of civilizational history. Using Niji carving tools to create repetitive markings in both carved clay and cast glass, the artist’s sculptural reliefs are dappled with imagined topographies and mysterious inscriptions.