GALLERY FIVE20

SARAH MOORE: While It Lasts

On Display April 13th thru May 18th

While It Lasts is a body of work mapping the landscapes that Moore physically yearns to inhabit, again and again, as if by compulsion. These are unsettled places,  rough and wild with high topographic contrast. Each painting is a response to  intense wanderlust. The paintings also evoke a sense of urgency: no landscape  remains unaltered by time, and increasingly so, by human impact. To paint a  landscape is to inhabit it again, or for the first time, or to know it in a more intimate  way. The human reaction to landscape is necessarily physical, and often emotional. The  landscapes to which we are instinctively drawn are also an extension of our interior  emotional landscapes. Moore explains, “I have heard people from Kansas, who are  used to the expansive freedom of the plains, describe how the mountains make  them feel hemmed-in, claustrophobic. And I have heard people from the mountains  of Appalachia say that the plains make them feel exposed and unprotected. They  love the mountains because they offer a safe embrace.” By drawing on motifs observed in the landscapes of 27 countries she has visited,  Moore’s paintings are rooted in reality and morphed by memory, allowing inevitable  inaccuracies to both create and erase information. A sense of movement suggests  ephemerality and impermanence. Like memories, the paintings dart from detail to  detail amidst a deconstructed and abstract context. Unexpected objects, snatched  from forgetting, find themselves nestled in the paintings like wayfinding tokens. “I am motivated by a longing to see these places, walk them, breathe them, while I  can. While I last and while they last,” Moore explains,“because the loss of a landscape  is not just that; it is also a loss of a piece of ourselves. When we lose landscapes, we  lose access to the parts of our psyche that are shaped by these places.”        

Sarah Moore was born in Marietta, GA in 1987 and lives and works in Knoxville, TN.  She earned a Master of Architecture degree from Washington University in St. Louis  in 2012, and was a Danforth Scholar for the duration of her study there — an honor  which recognized personal integrity, selflessness, and a commitment to community.  Sarah also holds a B.A. in Architecture from Clemson University, where she was an  Abney Foundation Scholar from 2005-2009.

Sarah has traveled to 27 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and  South America, and has lived briefly in Argentina, India, Israel, Nepal, Spain, and  Thailand. Through her travels, she has sought to understand the common, innate  need to connect with nature that spans cultures.

Sarah is also Communications and Marketing Manager for Active Living By Design , a  nonprofit that advances community-led action and proven, place-based strategies  to ensure health and well-being for all.