Saar Shemesh (b.1991, New York) is an artist and educator whose creative practice uses the aesthetics of feminist abstraction and abjection to complicate bodily, spatial, and emotional binary logics through architectural interventions/ installations, sculptures, text/ image-based studies, and sonic experiments. Through the use of materials like metal, silicone, foam, and wax that undergo a state change in order to take shape, they call upon visual references like mucosal membranes and craters to evoke visceral or destabilized feelings in viewers, highlighting conditions of mutability and transformation.

Shemesh recently completed an artist fellowship with the NYPL Picture Collection, working on their project titled “holes, wholes, and other voids,” that weaves together research nodes from the studio such as mold-making terminology, geo- and cosmo-logical phenomena, architecture, biopolitical erotics, liberation philosophies, and disability to investigate holes as metaphysical sites of power. They have been an artist-in-residence at Visual Arts Center (Richmond, VA), RAIR (Philadelphia, PA), Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, MN), and SOMA (Mexico City). Most recently, their work has been exhibited at D.D.D.D. (New York, NY), Current Space (Baltimore, MD), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Artlot (Brooklyn, NY), and Virginia MoCA (Virginia Beach, VA). They hold an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

IG: @saardaga