Sarah Sarchin

Someone (it’s not important who) around the late sixties posited that, regardless of inclination, the acts of seeing or watching can be recognizable as two distinct activities, each laden with their own precepts of what the eye will do. The former is about the punctual: I saw a woman. Watching, simply put, describes a durative activity like spending a couple hours at a movie. In these paintings by Sarah Sarchin (b. 1981, Ellensburg, WA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA), it’s a muted unease of whether what we see is exactly what it’s meant to look like. This seems especially wry in her work Frankenthaler I, where it’s a woman in a pink blouse and white pencil skirt, sitting coquettishly in front of a blue-white field of varying resolutions. She’s seemingly in a manicured pose; she’s seemingly being directed to be in one. There is a ruefulness to the finish, amplified by the sheer pleasantness of the source image of Helen Frankenthaler, Life magazine ingénue ca. 1957, literally sitting on her very own painting that makes the history of the event so discomforting.

The photograph was famously co-directed by her then-husband, Robert Motherwell. Told how to sit and where to look, she’s rendered down to an archetype so ersatz and acceptable as if becoming no more than a simplified, Grecian form. As a statuary symbol, Sarchin’s Frankenthaler I possesses the same effect as the other women in the works of the exhibition, all of whom are likewise within a specific moment of being merely seen in a classically agreeable way, while simultaneously engaged in the act of somehow unkindly seeing you: Mariah Carey in the midst of her infamous New Year’s Eve performance meltdown; the painter Victorine Meurent, the nude of Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, distilled on her own in strident gestures of green wash. When told what to do, let alone how to behave, you’re not necessarily what you are. Who, then, is looking at whom? They have their own ways of returning a skeptical gaze back at you, as though “reflected in streaming windowpanes/The look of others through their own eyes.” [1] You saw a someone and she is watching you.

1 - John Ashbery, ‘Wet Casements’