SaraNoa Mark

SaraNoa Mark (b. 1991, New York) makes gestural and material decisions that directly align with their conceptual concerns, synthesizing references as discreet as Seljuk architecture, Assyrian palace reliefs, Talmudic typesetting, and land art into a sculptural practice evocative of the ruins and remnants of civilizational ebb and flow. Invoking cuneiform tablets and the excavated foundations of ancient cisterns and citadels, the artist’s carved clay and cast glass reliefs incorporate built and written archaeological histories into a singular visual language of imagined topographies and cryptic inscriptions.

Like a cascading river or the gentle swipe of an archaeologist’s horsehair brush on a half-buried artifact, Mark’s creative process extracts imaginary traces from natural materials. Beginning with slabs of wet clay, the artist uses a set of Niji carving tools to gouge out trenches and scrape in hash-marks, shaping and removing clay until the slab is transformed and the composition complete. That nothing is added during this process mirrors not only the temporal degradation of antiquities and ruins, but also the molding of landscape by the vicissitudes of time: “I am moved,” the artist writes, “by the idea that discreet gestures can be repeated until they eventually carve rock and shape land.” Viewing this phenomena as a form of drawing – both in the studio and geologically – Mark sees ritual mark-making as a way to archive presence, to denote and preserve the vestiges of time. Raised in a religious Jewish household and the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, the artist’s practice emphasizes both the critical importance of collective memory and the daily experience of transliterating memory into ritualized practice.