Artist Series: Sarabeth Domal
Part II of II
An interview, a conversation, an interrogation, a manifesto. This is the Lucky Rigatoni Artist Series. I value the searching, the longing, the process. These conversations are gently edited for clarity. Thank you to Sarabeth for sharing her work and herself, and always, for everything. Our conversation is published in two parts — the first part can be found here. You can find more of Sarabeth’s work on her website.
Kelsey Swintek: You talk about how you’re not trying to tell people “don’t find the sublime golden hour moments of peak Fall terrible, and don’t try to not preserve them.” I’m going to read a quote from your thesis – in it you’re talking specifically about snapshot photography, but I just want to broaden the context to photography in general so you can have more bandwidth to answer. You write:
Snapshot photography is now less a function to capture and preserve memory than it is a route with which to construct your own personal reality.
I’m curious—in what ways does your art contribute to your own personal reality? In what ways does it preserve memory? And is there space for both, do you think?
Sarabeth Domal: This is like the main thing that I’m grappling with all the time. I find snapshot photography interesting because I’m immediately drawn to it. I have this incredibly irrational fear, like all of my fears and all of a lot of our fears, that I will one day lose my memory, and the only function that I understand to preserve that memory is through photography. And I cannot tell you how many photographs, just on my iPhone, that I have that I don’t remember taking and that I will never look at again in my entire life, that I thought in that moment, wow this is so important and I need to take a photograph of it—
KS: You’re speaking to me. I’m stressed.
SD: Yeah, Selfie Queen.
KS: *Laughs*
SD: The way that snapshot photography now lives is very online. The public facing reality that we are all encouraged to construct through incentives by getting likes on Instagram is not really reflective of how your life is going and what you’re experiencing on a day to day basis. Sometimes it is, but a lot of the times it's not.
The photo we post on social media is the sublime moment in front of you, it’s the best part of the night out with your friends, it’s so different from what's happening but that, in a way, is always the part of the memory that you want to hold on to anyway. You are the author of your memories and you are the person who dictates whether or not they can live or die with reality. If you remember the things that are most important to you, that’s great. If you remember the most fun you had and not the terrible moment, that’s fine.
But for me, I look at my art —and this is not a novel approach, artists have been doing this forever—but I think of this as like in a way that my art, making my art, and my photography is a feeble attempt to capture that specific moment when you were a kid, if you’re driving somewhere, for me it’s down the Garden State Parkway in the middle of exit 50 when there is absolutely nothing, and you press your face against the cold glass of the window and you try to get your eyes to focus on the individual trees all at once but you’re going like eighty miles an hour so it's impossible and its dizzying. I’m trying to take those moments and those memories and dissect them to the point where they become fragmentary, like fragments of fragments in a way, and then put them back together so that they can try to become the original thing. But what always happens is they become something else entirely. It’s something that is really too painterly to understand unless you’ve experienced it and you’ve been in it, which also makes my art so cryptic to other people. Which is obviously something I love, but something that needs explanation all the time.
But I never really know if it does resemble the original, because I can never remember anything exactly like it happened in the first place. What I try to do with my process is strictly structure everything: so I’m shooting in a grid, editing in a limited way, I’m not changing the colors, I’m just making the lighting consistent, and then my layering takes on a very robotic form.
That has always worked for me up until this point, when I started to not only consider the moments in my memories, but also the land, and the landscape, and those ecological histories that are layered in there as well. I’m trying to push my process in a way that I let go of the structure. I’m not shooting in a grid anymore. I’m not remembering the order in which I took the photographs. I’m still not editing, but I’m layering in very different ways. Just today, I printed some individual photographs — terrible for the environment — on a cling film/plastic transparent substrate so I can layer them manually. So I’ve started to see how that is going. But how does that relate to my memory now? I’m kind of losing that aspect of it. This is a total tangent.
My memory is so cryptic and visual, sometimes I don’t remember a lot of things that other people remember about my life, and that makes me really stressed. So this is always a cathartic exercise. Also sometimes a way to show people, hey this is literally what’s in my brain. This is how I’m seeing things, this is how I’m experiencing things on a day to day basis. Mostly the outside world, but also not. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
KS: No it does. It’s interesting too, like, I’m an egotistical maniac, but it’s — everything you’re saying about your visual medium, that’s exactly the same way I feel about writing. As in - this is my personal reality, but it’s also my memory. I can’t, as my own self, tell you what was real or what wasn’t real. It’s a memory and I don’t know how it’s been shaped in my experiences since then, or before then, or in the relationships that have continued versus maybe haven’t continued. And so it’s interesting to think about the way I use experiences in words, you are doing — I’m saying physically because you’re physically making something in some way, even if it’s just your finger pressing the mousepad and the shutter, but you’re making something. I guess I never really thought about your art as just being what the inside of your brain looks like.
You mentioned Instagram before, and the way that it relates to personal realities and memories. So I am curious — you kind of touched on this when you were talking about how you are absolutely not interested in exhibiting virtually anymore, but I’m curious how you as someone who has shared your own work on Instagram in order to promote shows or yourself for whatever reason, how/what do you make of social media as a tool to share Art (with a capital A)?
SD: Yeah, so it’s super interesting from a personal perspective. it’s something that I have a lot of anxiety over and stress about —
KS: Sharing your work specifically or Instagram in general?
SD: Sharing my work specifically on Instagram.Because my art is, in my view, the most personal part of me. Even if it is difficult to understand, it is something that comes out of me in a way that I can’t really explain. For me to compress it into a JPEG that’s 72 dpi so it will fit on my phone and not crash my phone, and then put that on Instagram and add a title or a hashtag or something. That feels to me like I’m almost, I don’t want to say belittle, but it feels like I’m belittling my own artwork. Something that has taken me months to complete and truly understand – and then I’m just like hey look at this.
I don’t know why, but the process of printing and presenting it to people, having the moment to explain something that is way too complicated to put in an Instagram caption – it gives the work so much more meaning. It gives me the opportunity to flesh it out, in a way. Whereas with Instagram, yeah, more people see it, but it still — I’m overanalyzing it. It’s still only within my own head. There are no discussions that can be successfully fostered in the Instagram comments section other than oh that looks great.
Recently, I’ve posted two photographs of my artworks that I have for sale right now. In between those photos, I posted a gallery of selfies that I took at weddings this summer. The wedding selfies got one hundred and thirty something likes and the artwork got like thirty likes.
KS: *Laughter*
SD: I’m not exactly keeping track of that, but I just think it’s hilarious because it’s not what the people want. I’m not gonna sit here and type out a caption explaining why I used the lens that I did when I was taking these 35mm photographs of these trees that were near my house. It’s just not the arena that I am interested in, and it also feels very vulnerable to me. If art was just making something for people to click a button to say whether or not they approved of it, I wouldn’t be doing art. It’s very convoluted.
KS: It’s literally crazy and it’s funny to hear you share even that one anecdote, it’s almost as if the, not even just Instagram as an app, but the culture that we have prescribed to the way we use Instagram, is completely antithetical to working as an artist today.
SD: Yeah totally. It totally is. So I’m always impressed with artists who are able to just kind of use their feed in a way that feels unselfconscious. Like there's this photographer named Victoria Sambunaris and she has a Guggenheim Fellowship and she’s an amazing large format landscape photographer, in a similar vein as many of the large format landscape photographers of the early 20th century in the US. But she uses her Instagram as a feed of her own iPhone photos. I just love that. She’ll sometimes say, yeah I have my work up here, or hey I’m traveling to this midwestern city today to go photograph, but her feed is mostly just her as a person, where I think so many times what artists do is try to make a brand for themselves. And obviously, as we know, Instagram is so conducive to building a brand and self-promotion in that sense. When their photos feel more genuine is when I’m drawn to it, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually been genuine in my own Instagram feed so I don’t really know how I would be able to do that as an artist.
KS: Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
SD: I mean really! Because I have this problem with being vulnerable. I think my artwork makes me vulnerable, even though it’s difficult to understand, I’d rather just throw it on my website and not tell anyone about it. So that’s obviously something I’m working through, but I just find it a lot more meaningful to have it on a platform where I can set the tone and the conversation. And set the presentation, I guess.
KS: Yeah. And it’s maybe not asking for external validation either. It is in a way if someone texts you and tells you about it, but it’s not as explicit, maybe?
SD: At this point in my “career,” it would just be meaningful for me to put my work on a wall anywhere, not even on a wall, like on some cement, I don’t even know. It would be so much more meaningful to have people who want to come and see new and innovative photography and artwork, look at my work and give it a moment of pause. That’s all I’m really wanting. I want that even more because of the pandemic because it took us all online in a way that turned out to actually be pretty unhealthy.
KS: I don’t know why I feel sad.
SD: Everything I said wasn’t the happiest. I don’t know.
KS: I’m not trying to spring this on you, but on your website you have like the different exhibits that you have, but you also have an entire page for the work you do on film, on 35mm. When we talk about sharing your work – are you more comfortable sharing something that you’ve maybe just shot and edited versus the work we were talking about earlier with the layering process and the stuff that you do digitally, that is maybe more conceptual than some of your film work has been? Or it’s all the same feeling for you, if you’re sharing it online?
SD: I think what’s interesting, all of my 35mm work on my website is just snapshot photography, but some of it I genuinely love so much that I want people to be able to see it if they want to. Whereas with my artwork — sometimes I genuinely hate it so much
KS: *Raucous laughter*
SD: —that I just don’t want anyone to look at it ever. And usually I’m able to back away from that and level myself out through conversations with other artists, and people who have influenced me, like my peers and my tutors and my mentors. Whereas I’m not as precious about my 35mm work. I think it’s a great reflection of how lucky I’ve been in my life to travel to all these amazing places, and take these photographs, and have this camera that I’m obsessed with and whatever. But because it’s not as conceptual, I don’t feel as uncomfortable sharing it. Which is also why the majority of photography on my Instagram feed is just my 35mm. They’re aesthetically pleasing, there’s a similar aesthetic to all of them. I mean not that my work doesn’t have a similar aesthetic, but it’s less me than it is what’s in the photograph.
KS: That’s really interesting.
SD: The artwork itself is just me and the landscapes, and I don’t really know how to explain that. Whereas like, oh I took a picture of a building in Vienna. That’s just a building in Vienna.
KS: It’s almost like even though it’s completely your work and you have your own aesthetic and the way you take the photo — all of that is very you because you are not manipulating it as much it’s less vulnerable, less personal, less of your own fingerprint, so you’re more comfortable, kind of thing?
SD: Yeah. Definitely.
KS: Interesting. I also wanted to ask about how you incorporate both the verbal and the visual in your work, but you did address that earlier.
SD: I can totally expand on that.
KS: I’m specifically curious about the WiP show. You combined text and photography and I wonder now, because of your earlier response, was that something you felt inspired to do because of the limitations of exhibiting online?
SD: Yeah. Definitely. So the WiP show is historically presented in the actual studio space you’re working in when you’re at the RCA. When we found out it was going to be online, there was this whole upload process that is only 24 hours long. When it’s shown in the physical studio spaces, it’s meant to really just be work in progress. And what we struggled with and what we talked about as a cohort of students, it’s almost impossible to show work in progress on the internet.
You have to upload a JPEG, I mean you can upload the photographs of all of the prints that you’ve done, but no one was able to do prints, because no one had access to the printers, because the school was closed. So, it was like, how do you still make something that is in progress but also final enough that you can put it in a predetermined algorithmic website layout?
That was what I struggled with. What I decided to do, in a way that honestly felt at times way too vulnerable to me, was expose my creative process. The poem that I wrote actually started in my Notes app on my phone. If I hear something in a song that inspires me to think of some phrase that means something to me, or I’m reading something and that means something to me, or sometimes these things pop into my head. I had this Note that eventually made itself into a Word Doc that was called Something. It basically started as a brainstorm list of what can I do for the WiP show? I’m not really sure where my work is going at the moment, just jot down anything that comes into your head when you’re like walking around and when you’re doing something or when you’re making work just to see how I can formulate an idea out of all of these things and it just kind of took on a life of its own.
But I’m always always always writing like that —in a fragmentary way, in phrases, in short paragraphs, sometimes in just a few words. When I have enough content, I can put them together into some type of cohesive “poem” (in quotes, or in inverted commas as they say in this country). Because I wanted to expose for the WiP show actually how my work in progress is made. And that is honestly one of only times I’ve ever showcased any of my writing, of which there is a lot more, and I haven’t really figured out a way to make it work alongside the work.That was kind of the benefit of putting this online. It was like — hey I can just put a text box here. And I don’t really know how to do that when it’s physically in front of me. That’s something I’m really trying to explore as much as I can, and push myself to do in the next few months, because I don’t really know how to.
KS: I’m exciiiiiiiiited. It also sounds like, in a way, when you’re trying to push yourself and explore, of course you can put a text box on a wall, people put shit on the wall all the time, but it’s also just, how do you as an artist find room for vulnerability when it’s extremely personal?
SD: And there is also something about a text box on a wall that can be so easily ignored. I mean not by everyone, everyone approaches it differently. I’m trying to figure out a way that can make both the physical (or the visual) image and the writing read together as one piece, instead of “a photograph and a caption,” which are yes, related, but separate. So, that might be—I might be undertaking an impossible task, who’s to say? But I’m sure this is something that people have grappled with before and I just haven’t figured it out yet.
KS: My mind is whirring. Even the power dynamics between the language we use of “photograph” and “caption,” you know?
SD: Yeah, it’s crazy. There’s so much to say on that for sure. Like how to even write about your own work is something that I’ve always—I’ve struggled with it and then suddenly, something has poured out of me that somehow makes sense. But I also sometimes think that I can use language to fill in, really elaborate language, to fill in gaps in my work that I haven’t figured out yet, kind of like a very temporary plaster. Which then makes it feel a lot more permanent because you’ve said it and you’ve spelled it out, but that doesn’t actually mean that it’s resolved. So that’s something that I’m always interested in.
KS: Wow. Wow. So on that note — Do you have any other final thoughts that we didn’t get to address during this time?
SD: How are you?
KS: I am okay. Yeah I’m okay.
SD: I don’t think I have. I don’t really know —it’s so great that you prepared questions because it’s impossible for me to talk about my work unprompted. Sometimes I just get into like a flow state.
KS: I’m like — let’s dig into that.
SD: It’s so, yeah. I don’t know. It’s difficult sometimes for me to even understand what I’m doing, and so I can’t imagine to the layperson who doesn’t do this, isn’t with me on this on a day to day basis, how confusing this must seem. But it's always about the visual way my memory works. It's always about the way memory and landscape are related, the way our memory sits within the land in ways we don’t always recognize, time and its passage, in general, things that are just way beyond my comprehension. I approach attempting to comprehend them through my photographic work. And you approach that through your writing, and I think that’s where we’ve both been able to find our niche recently, which makes me very happy.
KS: It makes me very happy too. I obviously haven’t done this before and I wanted to write down the questions almost to prompt myself, because I have a hard time, like I can’t separate you from your work. So it’s unfair for me to interview Sarabeth Domal, the artist, as Sarabeth Domal, my best friend from eighth grade.
SD: I was gonna say that! In your introduction, do you need to say, hi it’s Sarabeth Domal she’s an American artist in London, or does your readership know me? Or is it like—
KS: —they better fuckin’ know!
