Sara Greenberger Rafferty: Testing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Testing
September 12 – October 28, 2018

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Sara Greenberger Rafferty. For her fifth solo show with the gallery, Rafferty has created a suite of works in kiln-formed glass – a new process and medium for the artist. Using a limited palette, Rafferty’s glass works function as image, screen, and material. They are transparent and translucent images formed and deformed by the kiln’s metamorphic heat and the intrinsic properties of glass.

Much of the exhibition’s imagery is pulled from archival, stock, and discarded commercial film, primarily purchased via eBay. These include scans of negative and positive film, both in color and black and white, representing photographic exercises by teachers and students alike, along with orphaned promotional imagery of the pre-digital era. In addition, Rafferty references tools of vision, perception, and physical sensation. Iconography of body parts, a magnifying glass, books, and toys are layered and, in some cases, obscured in the process.

Testing, a word that the artist has used for individual artwork titles in the past, implies preparation and trepidation: of the microphone check of the stand-up comic, the rock and roll frontman (or the Queen of Soul); of the pedagogical examination of a student; of the diagnostic tool searching for an explanation; of the misfit – or even just a child – trying to define boundaries and lines of transgression, alternately failing and succeeding with each step.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty has exhibited widely since 2001, including solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College, Massachusetts; Fine Arts Center Gallery at University of Arkansas; and a commissioned sculpture for the Public Art Fund. Gloves Off, the first traveling survey of her work with accompanying fully illustrated catalogue published by SUNY Press, completed a threevenue tour last year.

The artist was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the 2014 Hammer Biennial in addition to group shows at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; and The Jewish Museum, New York, among many others. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Rafferty is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.