Sarah Vandermeer is a New Orleans-based artist currently pursuing an MFA in Art and Ecology at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Her work engages deeply with the emotional resonance of landscape and the uncanny aspects of spaces designed to evoke comfort or beauty. She is particularly interested in how spaces, despite their intended purpose, can subtly provoke unease, revealing a paradox where the very environments meant to soothe us instead expose existential anxieties. Through her work, Vandermeer investigates the disconnect between the atmosphere a space is designed to create and the emotional response it actually evokes. These spaces, rather than offering comfort, often unveil an underlying tension—an awareness of the fragility of our existence, in relation to the ecological crises we face.
VanDermeer’s research explores the intersection of ancient rituals, such as sympathetic magic, with contemporary ideas of hyperreality, particularly Baudrillard's theories of simulation and replication. She considers how the replication of objects—whether in art, culture, or technology—has created a language where the line between the real and the artificial is increasingly blurred. In the context of ecological collapse, this replication of syms, rituals, and objects has led to a return to magical thinking. Rather than dismissing this as a disruption of logical thought, Vandermeer regards magical thinking as a crucial way we engage with the world. Constructed ruins in her work serve as a metaphor for how we imbue our surroundings with meaning, drawing on ancient beliefs, rituals, and symbols that may never be fully understood. VanDermeers’s work is an opportunity to commune with unseen forces – all is not as it seems and things may act upon each other with a secret sympathy.
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