title: The Angry Red Planet
artist: Sarah Rieser
materials: collage on marquee cards from the 1959 sci-fi film, reimagined with paper ephemera collected during the pandemic and banded by gold foil letters which read, Science IS NOT Fiction, PLEASE VOTE!
dimensions: window is comprised of four panes measuring 30" x 30" each
location: 1437 Lily Cache Lane, Bolingbrook Illinois 60490
Like too many others, following the March orders, every opportunity I had planned for 2020 seemingly evaporated overnight. With shows cancelled, employment ended, and commissions disappeared, the work I have been making to survive being quarantined barely relates to my research practice anymore.
As the months pass living in an intergenerational household full of health conditions, the pieces I have been creating in order to participate in outdoor and virtual exhibitions reflect a hope I hardly believe. And so I felt the urge to speak up during this final week of impending doom, a need to call out to my neighborhood when they come to the door for candy.
This piece will be up for one week, throughout Saturday's Halloween festivities until the morning after the official election, when the question will be answered whether our country receives a trick or a treat ...
The Angry Red Planet by Sarah Rieser (click arrow for more images)
The work is composed of collage on marquee cards from the 1959 sci-fi film, reimagined with paper ephemera collected during the pandemic and banded by gold foil letters which read, Science IS NOT Fiction, PLEASE VOTE! each collaged panel references a debate topic, rewritten as B-movie roles with photo printed heads of conservatives, capitulators, and conspirators as an indictment of their contributions to our current national destruction: Irrational COVID-19 Response - starring Mike Pence, Scott Atlas, and Deborah Birx; Second Stimulus Attrition - starring Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Mnuchin, and Chuck Grassley; Racial Justice Refusal - starring Myles Cosgrove, Richard Spencer, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Derek Chauvin; Climate Crisis Denial - starring Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jim Inhofe, Pat Toomey, Ted Cruz, John Barrasso, and Mike Lee. On view: Wednesday, October 28th through Wednesday, November 4th
More on Sarah Rieser's practice
Sarah Rieser is a former interior designer born and raised thirty miles southwest of Chicago. Her art practice is a thematic exploration of consumption-related dysthymia, presently focused on the (mis)placement of adoration. She creates fiber-based mixed media artworks ornamented with a mishmash of repurposed novelty refuse that engage the fetishization of religious imagery and confront the wastage of planned obsolescence so prevalent in suburban culture, while introducing questions of taste, feminine labor, and prescriptive reliance on the nondurable. Her work conveys elements of ennui, humor, and irony by using traditional, labor-intensive processes to reinterpret disposable, mass-produced materials with the notion of reassigning value to nugatory consumer goods. And she currently owes SAIC a whole lotta dough for learning how to sound that pretentious ;)
website: https://sarah-rieser.tumblr.com/