Sarah Rara

Sarah Rara works with video, film, photography, and performance and is a contributing member of the band Lucky Dragons. A direct artist grant from the foundation will assist the artist’s development of a new body of work entitled “The Pollinators,” which focuses on the insects, birds, animals, and vectors that pollinate flowers. Filmed against brightly colored backgrounds that both attract and distract pollinators, the video explores wild color spaces, aiming to extend human vision into something akin to the wider ultraviolet-rich color range perceived by Pollinators.

“The Pollinators” presents a poetic yet empirical study of nature and playfully examines the pollinator as part of a complex system, with intricate patterns arising from relatively simple interactions. The video explores the complimentary pairing of plant and pollinator, and the inter-connectedness of forms that each takes on. The project includes photographs, video, and sound.

Using very little post-production, the videos come together in front of the lens. Optical effects are produced by the interaction of light, lens, and object, generating images that make visible subtle natural and physical forces that are at once both explicit and mysterious.