ArtSpace Gallery exhibit – Collage paintings by Sarah Dupré

Sarah Dupré is a non-objective abstract artist who grew up in South Central Louisiana and moved to Illinois in 2015. Dupré received her BFA from McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA (2015) and her MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL (2018). Using graphite, charcoal, tar and influence from industrial processes, Sarah’s work is an execution of drawing, painting and collage. Her work exposes gestures and reconfigured layers that honor the relationship of erosion and liberation.

Dupré’s interest is steeped in the infrastructure of the American landscape and psyche of diverse collectives. The artist’s practice is an ongoing observation of the inevitable, regenerative, cyclical cycle of decay and regrowth. In addition to Dupré’s personal studio, selected works can be found through Boccara Art, Miami, FL, Studio 6f, Chicago, IL, and Last Work Shop, Chicago, IL. Sarah Dupré is a board member of Purple Window Gallery, Chicago, and an upcoming resident at Pouch Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (2024.) Her work was most recently published in New American Paintings, No. 155, Midwest Issue, and will have work appear on an upcoming Apple TV series that will be announced later this year.

“Out the Cut” exhibits the artist’s influence from the stains seeping out of a manmade industrial landscape. Adopting a graphic approach that teeter-totters between reaction and response, Dupré draws inspiration from “rational” manufacturing and observes the irony of “reason.”

Visually, the artist is guided by oil rig lines running through the horizon of coastal waterways. She follows trails of construction deposits that trace their way down overpasses, and her lens gazes at flooding roads, back-alley canals and quick-set patchwork executed by city officials. She is directed by way of lubricated railroad iron, oxidized motor oil and plumes of diesel exhaust barreling out of tractors sowing the land. Dupré’s work is a rearranged record (sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically) of a landscape built by her forebears. Distilling excerpts of an environment that is deceptively grounded in civic virtue, her work embraces marks of power and marks of abandonment and holds witness to their relationship of an unending poem of what was, what is and what could be.