Sarah Parker at UNM

WHERE ARE WE ACTUALLY FROM? We live on land that has been occupied — where people have been buried — for thousands of years. What can we understand about the fragile relationship between humans and nature? Where, as systems of society change, do we go?” mused printmaker and digital artist Sarah Parker.

Join Parker on Thursday (Jan. 26) as she explores these and related questions in her first solo exhibition, “Circling Lives: A Look at My People and Their Bones.” The show premieres at the Atrium Gallery of the University of New Mexico–Taos, with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served, all are welcome and admission is free.

The works Parker has chosen to share are large-scale block prints on fabric and paper, fiber art and mixed media drawings with ink, charcoal, and colored pencil. “I consider it more of an installation,” one which will also feature video projections of her digital art and animation. “I consider it a self-examination,” but it also speaks to universal themes: “that of the greater system we’ve created as a society and now live in.”

Parker embraces the fact that her work is rooted in what is traditionally considered craft. She uses those materials along with “high art” ones while assigning no hierarchical structure to them. It is a powerful synergy, one which renders Parker’s work as accessible to everyone.

Parker has lived in Sunshine Valley, north of Questa, for the past 18 years. It is, she acknowledged, an isolated community, but one surrounded by public lands and amazing, stark beauty. When she was sequestered during the pandemic, she began to consider “the isolation that is a part of living on the land, questioning how I arrived at this solitary place and what right do I even have to be here.”

“I became obsessed with digging up my old people’s bones, a metaphor for where we are in this collective of societal systems we call life, the dotted path of [those before us] along the land marking the roads that placed me in this space.”

“The relationships between ourselves and our environments are complex and fraught with the tenderness and fragility of survival. This exhibition is motivated by the idea that life is delicate, whether one lives off the land or in the cities,” she continued. “It considers the push to survive and the universal theme of inevitable death. It questions the byproducts of American capitalism such as mass incarceration, gender expectations and our evertenuous modern relationship with the land.”