Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present Heights Where the Light Still Lingers, Sarah Bostwick’s fifth solo show with the gallery. Bostwick continues her quest to capture space through a series of small relief sculptures which evince monumental subjects, composed of sweeping plains incised with laser-etched photographic detail. The title of Bostwick’s show comes from W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, in which the lives of the main characters are told through stories about public architecture in Northern Europe—during a time when train stations eclipsed cathedrals as works of significance.

All but one work in the show consist of white-on-white castings of photographic textured reliefs. The exception, Glass Ceiling, is a gilded bronze cage etched with an ornate texture of filigreed cast iron and stained glass. The shallow, concave rectangle, cast from a photograph taken at the Hotel Metropol on Red Square in Moscow, is simultaneously monumental in its beauty and strength, and melancholy in its evocation of the viewer’s unseen limits. The series also includes several more works depicting the Moscow subway system, also known as “palaces of the people,” featuring ornate marble and chandelier-strewn public spaces, alongside scenes from Los Angeles that range from iconic to mundane. Norms at Night (Study in White) is a cast of the Norms 24-hour diner sign in a state of blinking off. Both an homage to the painter Ed Ruscha and a symbol of the Southern California metropolis, the sign towers above the viewer yet is half swallowed by shadows manufactured by the impending dusk.

Through her works, Bostwick attempts to create mysterious and intricate tableaux that reveal themselves over time. The landscapes of her subjects themselves capture time with cinematic clarity, utilizing light to define pictorial space and to transform the perceived time in which the scenes are set, as well as the mood they are meant to convey. In these pieces, the built environment is best understood not via depiction, but through a process of physical demonstration in which each work transforms magically into the subject itself. As a meditation on the urban and the manmade, Bostwick’s work explores the relationship between nature and construction, and looks at how our sense of the sacred and monumental is informed by the intersection between the two. Her deft interweaving of the characteristics that separate the subterranean from the daylight, depth from surface, nature from the trappings of civilization, reveal elements poised against each other in a dynamic tension of texture, shadow, and reflection.

Sarah Bostwick received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her solo exhibitions include Mayes Lumber, Art Brussels, Brussels, 2013; Sarah Bostwick, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM, 2012; Gray Area, Gregory Lind Gallery, 2011; Passages, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, 2009; Landlord White, Gregory Lind Gallery, 2008; and Homecoming, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, 2006. Recent group exhibitions include Life Transmissions, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA, 2014; and All Things Give Way, PØST, Los Angeles, CA, 2014. Bostwick’s work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA, The Progressive Art Collection, and Microsoft Art Collection. She has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times. Bostwick participated as a 2011 Fellowship at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, Roswell, NM. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

• Press release (PDF) | Artist bio (PDF)
• Press: Art Practical