Saar Shemesh (b. 1991) is an artist and educator born and based in New York City. They utilize sci-fi aesthetics and the sensory potential of mold-making and casting to create abstract and immersive works across mediums. Fluidity, repair, and transformation guide their research and decision-making in and out of the studio, cropping up in forms borne by oyster shells, craters, internal organs, ephemera, and junkyard scraps (to name a few). Operating on a nonlinear timescale structured by queerness and chronic illness, Saar often works with materials that undergo a necessary and often messy state-change in order to take shape. They are concerned with neglected and liminal intersections in our understanding of identity, spatial politics, and embodied experience. 

Saar has been an artist-in-residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA, RAIR Philly, PA, Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, and SOMA, Mexico City. Recently, they have shown at 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.

Saar is currently a 2024-25 fellow at the NYPL Picture Collection, working on their project titled “wholes, holes, 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. It may become a performance-lecture, a film, a publication, and/or a set of drawings and object relations, who knows.

IG: @saardaga