Sarah Cain: Wild Flower

Timothy Taylor, London, is proud to announce Wild Flower, a solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain. This is Cain’s first exhibition with the gallery, and her second time exhibiting in the UK following a solo presentation at Bold Tendencies in 2012.

A self-proclaimed “renegade”, Sarah Cain pushes the limits of the language of abstraction and challenges the established conventions of painting, fusing a myriad of gestures and materials, whilst incorporating quotidian and poetic ephemera. Working against the parameters of trial, risk and responsive experimentation, Cain systematically sets herself modal challenges, which are, in turn, resolved and overcome. The result is a chaotic equilibrium between the formal elements of painting and objects included into the surface. The title of the exhibition, and the eponymous painting Wild Flower, highlights the latent tenacity within Cain’s practice, likening it to the resilience of the small blooms that break their way through the tiniest cracks of concrete – a symbol of something unintentional, thriving in an unexpected environment.

Wild Flower showcases a suite of 9 new paintings, as well as the interventions of a stained glass panel inserted into a central window, and a large painting made on-site across the back wall of the main gallery space. Each work functions as an individual exercise in “objecthood”*, with the addition of beading, bells, chains, tassels and crystals allowing wall-based works to extend into three-dimensional space. Confronting the physical extremities of making, and the use of non-traditional art materials, Cain questions notions of hierarchy and explores the potential of transcendence through the painting process. Talisman-like items imbued with personal significance are able to surpass their trivial beginnings to become sincere gestures – and extend Cain’s personal experience into a larger, shared, space.

Within the exhibition, there is a specific nature to each component allowing for dynamic relationships between each autonomous work, whilst simultaneously contributing to a larger identity of the whole. Rather than being united by a concise visual thread, it is an understanding of the fundamental properties of objects, colours and shapes that underwrites these works – and unexpectedly binds them together. In these internal dialogues, a colour palette bounces from one work to another, or the curve of a chain detail becomes echoed in an alternate geometric structure. The resulting body of work is surprisingly, and successfully, bigger than the sum of its parts. 

*Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, 1967