Since 2003, Dublin based artist Sarah Pierce has used the term - The Metropolitan Complex - to describe her ongoing project as an artist. Despite its institutional resonance, this title does not signify an organization. Instead, it demonstrates Pierce’s broad understanding of cultural work, articulated through working methods that often open up to the personal and the incidental. Characterized as a way to play with a shared neuroses of place (read ‘complex’ in the Freudian sense), whether a specific locality or a wider set of circumstances that frame interaction, her activity considers forms of gathering, both from the perspective of historical examples and the situations that she initiates. The processes of research and presentation that Pierce undertakes highlight a continual renegotiation of the terms for making art: the potential for dissent and self-determination, the slippages between individual work and institution, and the proximity of past artworks.

 

Sarah Pierce was born in 1968 in Connecticut and grew up in Ontario. Lost Illusions/Illusions perdues is a solo exhibition in three parts, developed jointly with Walter Phillips Gallery Banff AL, Mercer Union Toronto ON, and SBC Galerie Montreal QB. Recent solo presentations of her work include: Monogamy, an exhibition by Gerard Byrne and Sarah Pierce, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr at The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Bard; Towards a Newer Laocoön, curated by Sarah Glennie at National College of Art and Design Gallery, Dublin; and The Artist Talks, curated by Emily Pethick at The Showroom, London. Group presentations include various exhibitions and performance events, as well as recent biennials from Limerick (2012), Lyon (2011), and Sinop (2009), to Venice (2005), where she was one of seven artists to represent Ireland. In 2013, Book Works published Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors by Sarah Pierce, the first artist book on Pierce’s work, edited by Rike Frank and designed by Peter Mulbury.

 

 

 

Lost Illusions/Illusions perdues - Part one:​ Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff

Lost Illusions/Illusions perdues - Part two: Mercer Union, Toronto