Born in 1988 in Paris, Sarah Caillard obtained a master’s degree in visual art at the École Nationale Supérieure de La Cambre in 2014. Her artistic practice expresses otherness or alterity present in each of us by building a mythology. She works across sculpture, video, photography and drawing using these disciplines to build installations. Within this created mythology the different figurative representations are non divisible, they complement each other to evoke the complexity and plurality of being.
The issue at the heart of her work is one that leads her to question the underlying mechanisms at work and how it affects our construction as individuals within a society and, she uses these same processes to create fictional narratives. More specifically she is interested in ‘the gaze’, its duality between projection and domination and the role that the imaginary occupies in our perception of others and that of ourselves. Her research is oriented towards myths, legends, history, popular culture and other contemporary forms of entertainment, particularly that of western civilization. Inspired by philosophy and psychoanalysis she investigates their sources, origins, influences and other reinterpretations to find similarities with symbols, archetypes and forms of representation that belong to the collective imagination and resonate across time and culture. She looks to reveal the narrative and/or visual patterns that are at work throughout history. These patterns reveal sensitive codes that are transmitted to us, and they actively participate in our construction as social beings.
"I like to consider these patterns as ghostly figures, ones that inhabit us without a particular belonging, figures that represent the presence of otherness, multiple facets that define the individual as a layered entity. I embody them in sculpture, making characters, and it is the different materials and techniques used that represent their allegorical meaning. They evolve in phantasmagorical places and are positioned in situations through drawings and videos. In these videos, models and installations serve as sets, and the sculptures become accessories. I am aesthetically drawn towards home videos, youtube clips, instagram stories, living room danse shows…. moments of individual expressions that can be gathered to form a collective creative entity. It’s the aesthetics of these clips, these everyday forms of expression that I try to carry into my work. I combine these with Low fi special effects with DIY film sets (such as green key, incrustation, models, costumes etc). I look to conserve the fragility of these gestures as much as their magical potential. I also draw inspiration from cartoons and cinema. "
These different processes are brought together in installations that designate a point of view that positions the spectator as a witness, voyeur or seer. They thus create different temporalities and materialities within the work, which is not only experienced physically - during the exhibition of installations - but simultaneously through access to video links, that can be experienced long after the installation is removed.
Thus The same “object” has several levels of reading, treated with a triple gaze: real, symbolic and phantasmagorical; inscribing it within a fictitious relationship where it becomes the infinite subject of interpretations and projections that constantly redefine our identity.