Bio
Sarah Umles (b. 1986, Germany) is a queer-femme Ashkenazi Jewish artist, independent curator, arts administrator, and collector stewarding Hahamog'na-Tongva tribal land in Los Angeles, California. Sarah's interdisciplinary practice spans installation, digital media, text, performance, relational aesthetics/social sculpture, and experimental curatorial practices. Most notably, her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL), California Museum of Photography (CA), Stove Works (TN), Franconia Sculpture Park (MN), Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center (MA), The Art Center Highland Park (IL), CICA Museum (South Korea), and SAP Space Berlin @ Juxtapose Art Fair (Denmark). Sarah has been awarded residencies with the MOUNT Curatorial Residency at Design Cloud Gallery Chicago, Franconia Sculpture Park, Gracia, Stove Works, BONFIRE, and Soaring Gardens; and she was the recipient of the 2023/24 City of Pasadena Individual Artist Grant. Most recently, Umles was honored with the Puffin Foundation’s Environmental Artistic Activism Grant.
As an independent curator, Sarah has organized numerous exhibitions in both traditional and alternative contexts across Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. She is the founder and director of The Residency Project—an artist residency and project platform that amplifies historically underrepresented artists and projects at the nexus of art, ecology, identity, and intersectional justice. Sarah holds an MA in Arts Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Creative Writing with a minor in Film & Visual Culture from the University of California, Riverside.
Artist Statement
As an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, Sarah Umles’s work materializes as multimedia installations of sculpture, sound/video, text, and photography; performances and rituals rooted in ancestral and intuitive practices; and relational artworks. Through intimate narrative, critical inquiry, and the confrontation of hushed subjects, she explores themes of loss, grief, legacy, memory, resilience, and repair—on a deeply personal level, at the scale of global ecological collapse, and in terms of the oppressive systems we function within and against. She is interested in how social-cultural identity and self-knowing are constructed through our relationships with material culture, visual media, nature, and technology. Umles is drawn to the unexpected moments of absurdity that we stumble upon in our technology-laden lives, particularly when the digital tools we’re so heavily reliant upon inevitably falter or fail. As such, her work often stems from the “algorithmic oddities, accidental abstractions, glitches, and slippages” that occur in the built environments we inhabit every day. Using found media, screenshots, and readymades in addition to performance, text, and photography, Umles examines how our screen-mediated experiences inform (and deform) our senses of self and our understandings of the world around us. With Umles’s background in creative writing, language plays an essential role in her practice. Words—their roots, shapes, sounds, and multitudinous meanings—serve as pieces of poetic armature; structural foundations for the visual components of her work.