Evaporated Hoursby SaraNoa Mark

Evaporated Hours, SaraNoa Mark’s (b. 1991, New York) debut solo exhibition with the gallery, adopts its title from the artist’s process of desalinating seawater by collecting buckets from the Atlantic Ocean and boiling off the water until only salt remains. Paired with limestone slabs watered daily with an erosive vinegar solution, and presented in aluminum basins, the eponymous work (Evaporated Hours) 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 land 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 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.

Curving around corners (the wind will keep you standing and Triangle Moon) and protruding from walls (Desiccation Drawing), Mark’s use of epoxy clay has allowed them to explore dimensional qualities of architecture. Colored in dusty pinks, ochre, boreal blues and mauve, the glass sculptures’ softly ridged surfaces and liquid interiors are dependent on light for their delineation and translucence. Distanced from the wall with custom brass armatures, their surfaces deepen in tone and definition depending on the viewer's angle of approach. Forward toward dusk, which hangs from the gallery’s ceiling in front of a large window, absorbs and refracts the changing light of day, shaded or aglow, like receding ice on a springtime lake.

Like salt gleaned from seawater, the works in Evaporated Hours emerge from repetition and ritual, layering of gestures and inscriptions, shifting with the passage of time. Made from thousands of small marks, they trace a cumulative continuum through the centuries: to record and to reify; to build, decay, and rebuild; to be blind and to see.

SaraNoa Mark is the recipient of numerous grants including a Fulbright research fellowship in Turkey, grants from Artadia, the U.S. Embassy Mission Grants Program in Turkey, Harpo Foundation, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, John Anson Kittredge Fund, Illinois Arts Council, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Individual Artists Program (DCASE), West Collection, and Chicago Artists Coalition.

Mark has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Chicago Artists Coalition, Montello Foundation, Wave Hill, Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Bronx River Art Center. In 2025, Mark will be an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Dieu Donné and Yaddo.

Recent exhibitions of their work have taken place at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, CA; The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, ME; CA; Davis & Langdale, NY; Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, IL; 5533, Istanbul, among others. Mark was named a Newcity magazine Breakout Artist in 2021 and their work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, ARTNEWS, and ArtAsiaPacific, among other publications.