Whitney Sage

Fri, Jul 10, 2020 - 6:00 PM
Sat, Aug 8, 2020 - 4:00 PM

As a native of the suburban Detroit area, the rich cultural heritage of midwestern cities and their relevance the “American way of life” has always been influential to my practice. Midwestern “Rust Belt” cities are places of increasing cultural relevance with parallels to larger national struggles related to class, race and urban disinvestment. My work, through an expanding range of mediums, aims to address the generational impact of flight and disinvestment on Detroit’s sprawling middle class neighborhoods. As a suburbanite, I find myself constantly addressing my own relationship with the city despite physical and experiential distance. As such, themes I gravitate toward address this distance through its side effect, cultural misunderstanding and ambivalence, often reflected in the tropes of media coverage addressing urban areas as disaster zones or empty wastelands. In attempting to connect outside viewers to the work, the work uses allusions to the domestic space of the home as an empathetic entry point for emotional longing and nostalgia toward place. The three related bodies of work on display at ROY, Portraits of Home, Homesickness Series and Domestic Artifacts use the language tintype photography and physical found objects to recall experiences and make present what has been lost to deterioration, destruction and lapses in memory and history. While my practice is rooted in deeply personal experiences, the work seeks to appeal to many through notions of home, loss, hope and the protective impulse that we share for the people and places we love.

You can find more of Whitney’s work here

Follow Whitney when she takes over ROY’s IG July 21 & 23

Artwork is for sale and priced as marked. Artists receive 65% of sales and the 35% ROY retains is invested back into the gallery. 

Portraits of Home Series

Editioned reproduction prints available $65

Homesickness Series

Editioned reproduction prints available $250

Homesickness Series

Editioned reproduction prints available $250

Domestic Fragment Series

NFS

ROY asks

1. What is your name and pronouns?

Whitney Sage (she/her)

2. What medium(s) do you work with and why?

I consider myself a multidisciplinary artist and many of my works bridge the practices of painting, drawing and sculpture. I like to work in a variety of media because I found the various mediums really allow me to address the themes in my work from a variety of points of view. For the sculptures and drawings in the show, I see the works and practices of making as partners in their ability to address absence, abandonment and loss.

3. How has art (whether it be your own or art in general) changed you?

Art has expanded my mind, whether it be through exposure to work that challenges conventional media approaches, artworks that actually improve the communities around them or work that gives voice to minority perspectives and experiences. I think in experiencing the work of others, it helps facilitate empathy and understanding to the experiences and points of view different from your own. In terms of making my own work, I have over time learned to be a much more patient and resilient person because as a maker you need to learn to value of growth, delayed gratification and productive failure.

4. How did you start your artistic practice?

The trajectory that led to my current practice really began when I moved out of state from the metro-Detroit area for school. The reactions I received from people I met when they learned I grew up near Detroit showed that people had a very different impression of Detroit than I had. In defense of the city, I started creating work that aimed to show a more complex, complicated image of the city and one that aimed to acknowledge the experiences of community members.

5. Your works deal specifically with intersectional topics such as culture, history, the American identity, and "homesickness". Have there been any hurdles or struggles that you experienced when dealing with these subjects on your own?

The work is definitely complicated by the fact that I'm just a single individual and my perspective on these topics comes with my own biases and beliefs, especially as a native of the neighboring suburbs. A fairly continual struggle of mine is rationalizing the nostalgia in the work in the face of historical complications in Detroit's housing including red-lining, white flight, and even the fact that for many people, the experience of the home can represent for some a site of trauma. Nostalgic historic remembrance is, in that way, a privilege that not all are afforded. Also, the concept of "American identity" is itself always complicated, because it revolves around optimistic ideals of self determination and rugged individualism that have historically been flawed because of the vast diversity of Americans who have institutionally excluded and been denied opportunities. Detroit is actually a perfect example of how the "American Dream" was never equally realized by all facets of society and in that way, the failure of Detroit and it's neighborhoods, once seen as a utopian beacon of the rise of the American middle class, addresses the underbelly of these identity principles. So with all of these concerns, it can become difficult for me to see the value of glorifying memory sometimes.

6. When a first-time viewer looks at your art, what is the first word that you hope they think when looking at it?

Melancholy. I know for many viewers that the experience of viewing artwork can be associated with visual or emotional pleasure, but given the subject matter, I feel that there needs to be an experience of loss and sobriety for the works to be truly effective.

7. If you could meet any artist of your choosing (whether living or dead) and spend a day with them, who would it be?

Judy Chicago is one of my favorite living artists and specifically I really resonate with her approach to media, especially the championing of media often relegated to practices of "craft". I think as a female artist who is pretty early in my career, I would learn a lot from that generation of women artists, Chicago included, who really paved the way through their work, activism and tenacity to open up new definitions for what's considered fine art and new avenues  for generations of female artists who came after them.