Elevate at 21c: Sage Dawson

Elevate at 21c showcases the work of artists in St. Louis and the central Mississippi River region, highlighting the range and depth of visual culture in this dynamic, ever-changing area. 

Sage Dawson and Jen Everett each create artworks based on nostalgia and remembrance of the past. The artists hold firm to the units that make up a life – a building, a quilt, a song, a photograph – these are documentation of memories and lives lived. Objects, whether physical or intangible, become the legacy connecting past with present and the subjects of these artworks. Through materials and sources left from the past, the artists celebrate the experiences of the underrepresented and the structures of shared culture and community, neighborhoods and creativity, and the homes that allowed them to thrive. By remaking the references in different forms, the artists sustain the memory while reimagining the legacy into the present.

Through Everett’s use of vintage ephemera, especially objects that celebrate the technology and memory of the photo album, the viewer can imagine the sounds of gathering with loved ones. These unheard sounds come through in images of family members and strangers collected by the artist. She crops, considers, and stacks images and objects with textures worn. The vintage sonic equipment featured in these works is sourced from thrift stores and family friends and interspersed with literary and sonic references from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They are quietly queer totems, speaking to the importance of the family unit and the key role music played in developing queer identities. Everett tells unspoken stories which glimpse into the interior lives of Black Americans, showing moments of the everyday, while also building myths and stacking totems to the power of family, music, and memory. As Alexander Nemerov writes of Everett’s artwork, these objects provide “proof against omnipresent loss.” The artist invites the viewer to look closely and connect with moments and objects from a fragile but formative past.

Dawson creates artworks based on historical regional textiles, including needlepoint, weaving, and quilt patterns. Through extensive research, the artist unearths handiwork skills and textile designs created primarily by women in previous generations. Inspired by these near-forgotten designs, Dawson labors through process-based techniques of printmaking and layering or building in paper pulp, instead of fabric or thread. The artist opens a window to the past – celebrating the handmade family quilt, a legacy that was once central to the comfort of our most intimate spaces. In BRICK MYTH and the DEMO Project, Dawson references the structures and buildings of the past. During the 19th and 20th centuries, St. Louis was an epicenter for the manufacturing of building materials, especially ornamental brick. Dawson references the ornamental patterns from bricks now housed at the National Building Arts center in Sauget, Illinois in collagraphic prints to build the tent-like walls of a Persian-inspired pleasure-pavilion. The walls of the BRICK MYTH installation are presented here sharing an aspect of the American city that is about both structure and collapse. Similarly, in the DEMO Project, Dawson creates works on paper to imagine the moments leading up to, during, and just after a house is torn down. By reinventing elements from the past, the artist connects the viewer to that which makes up a life, whether structurally, systemically, or personally.

Sage Dawson

In several works in this exhibition, Dawson utilizes paper pulp as a new medium to her practice. The artist recreates historical regional textiles with a material that allows her to both paint and build the patterns originally created in needlepoint, weaving, or quilting. She builds these lattice-like structures in multiple layers, similar to the multiple steps used in printmaking, while adding a new textural element reflecting the threads and fabric that originally made the image source material. In DEMO Project, Dawson imagines the moments leading up to, during, and just after a house is torn down. She envisions the pinnacle of the demolition, piecing together a mythical end for the house that is intricate, puzzling, and strange while systematically indexing the physical pieces which once made up this home. Dawson acknowledges the complexities of land use and gives agency to opposing ideas within the site: life and death, growth and collapse, materiality and transcendence. Brick Myth was originally exhibited as a tent-like structure inspired by Persian pleasure-pavilions. The printed pattern on the fabric comes from ornamental brick patterns – a distinguished building product manufactured in St. Louis in the 19^th and 20^th century. Dawson uses patterns from bricks now found in the collection of the National Building Arts Center, an organization that salvages and indexes architectural materials from destroyed or renovated buildings.

Sage Dawson is an artist and curator whose work examines the politics of housing and labor inherent to the American city. She’s drawn to analog approaches to technology, and explores ways of making that typify domestic labor: banner-making, needlepoint, open-work, patterning, and sewing. Engaging in these means of production activate, realize, and archive their specific history. Sage is currently the Co-Director at STNDRD (Granite City, Illinois) and NON STNDRD (Sauget, Illinois). She completed an MFA with a minor in Museum Studies from the University of New Mexico, and a BFA from Missouri State University. She has curated exhibitions and presented her work at various sites, including The Luminary (St. Louis), Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Michigan), the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Ortega y Gasset (Brooklyn), Tate Exchange, Practise (Chicago), Super Duchess (New York), the Saint Louis Art Museum, Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis), and the Counterpublic Triennial (St. Louis). Sage is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis.