Nationality American Name Sara Arledge | Role Artist Died 1998 | |
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INTROSPECTION music by ENTROPIA
Sara Kathryn Arledge (September 28, 1911 – 1998) was an American artist first acknowledged for her contributions to experimental film in the 1940s. She painted throughout her career and worked in the media of glass slide transparencies, which combined attributes of painting and filmmaking that interested her. Her paintings were first exhibited posthumously in the exhibition "The Making of Personal Theory: Mysticism and Metaphysics in the Work of Sara Kathryn Arledge, Charles Irvin, and Jim Shaw," curated by Irene Tsatsos at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California.
Arledge is noted for her glass slide transparencies created by layering pieces of multicolored stage-light gelatins and baking them on glass slides. The artist then draws on the surface of the gels with a variety of objects and seals the images by covering them with another set of glass slides.
The fragile nature of this medium led her to make her "stabile color films" between 1978 and 1980 that integrated the slides and sound recordings in such works as "Tender Images", "Interior Garden I", "Interior Garden II", and "Iridium Sinus (Cave of the Rainbows)". Her most recognized films were "Introspection" (1946) and "What Is A Man?" (1958). Filmmaker Barbara Hammer described how Arledge "creates films that combine structural and painterly concerns guided by the emotions" and "represents for us the filmmaker as a whole person, as unified woman, as liver/artist".
Born in Mojave, California, Arledge received a Bachelor of Education in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1936. She also attended Columbia University and studied painting at the Barnes Foundation. She taught at the Department of Art at the University of Oklahoma from 1943–44, and at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1945-46.