Echoes and Emergence: Movement, Memory & Emotion Made Visible

Robin Jack Sarner: Echoes and Emergence explores how movement and gesture can hold memory and transform emotion into form. Layered pigment, sweeping marks, and subtle traces of ephemera trace the body’s motion as both remembrance and release. The solo exhibition of gestural paintings and works on paper, is now on view at Palos Verdes Art Center. The show is curated by Daniela Saxa-Kaneko, executive director of PVAC and it will be on view until Jan. 3.

In her artist talk in December, Sarner shared her painting evolution and the deep meaning behind her works. Substantial in size, this show’s name represents Sarner’s re-entering into her passion of painting after 25 years and raising her children — Emergence, while also following ‘her-story’  as a listening process in which her works talk to her — Echoes. These echoes are made up of critics, her parents sending love messages, influences of what she has become, and the cast of characters who want to destroy her work. Sarner noted as she moves forward, the echoes are softer and not yelling as loud.

The echoes are my past, personal history, ancestral memory, the textures and fragments that shaped me. Emergence is the other side of that, stepping forward, growing into who I’m still becoming. My process is about holding both: honoring where I’ve been while leaving room to move into what’s next. — Robin Jack Sarner

Sarner is a technically trained “realistic painter” but the artist revealed while her training gave her craftsmanship, she found it boring. Instead, she wanted to paint what was in her head. Sarner dealt with anxiety as a child; as an adult that unease turned into “feverish work” where she could unload her tension. Echoes and Emergence is the culmination of eight years of mostly large works, as the artist embarked on an exploration of how gesture moves. She takes an honest approach to her work and stated gesture is the most honest aspect to her. The artist’s energetic paintings are full of emotion which she transfers onto the canvas or paper. The pieces of ephemera she merges into her works translate into stories.  

About stories, Sarner has a fascination with maps and Thomas Guides. They represent a bird’s eye view to her which equates to freedom. The pieces of ephemera within this show’s works are made from maps that belonged to Sarner’s deceased grandmother; a lost sense of past in current times. Sarner records that past through her works with the continuity of paper, evoking foregon tools in our digital world.

Abstract expressionism interests Sarner because of its material based process. Taking an intuitive approach to it, she said the gestural painting connects to her emotionally. It has “become her language” and it’s “breaking the rules.” But there is an intentional method to this non-conformist artist. Through Echoes and Emergence viewers are invited to slow down and feel the resonance between body and image, past and present, stillness and motion. Rather than simply observing, visitors are asked to sense, to recognize the gestures that live within their own memories and to reflect on what it means to emerge, again and again, from the echoes that shape us.

This is where Sarner’s other work as a contributing artist to Art At Your Fingertips serves students. AAYF is a PVAC school-based outreach program that brings visual arts education to elementary school classrooms from developmental kindergarten through sixth grade in public and private schools since 1976, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Volunteer docents attend ten on-site workshops to deliver five, quality, standards-based art projects to students. The program has since developed partnerships to expand PVAC’s reach beyond the peninsula to ethnically diverse, underserved students throughout Los Angeles County.

Sarner, who started as a docent, recently developed an AAYF project, made a curriculum and taught volunteers at a training workshop, who, in turn, instructed the students in their individual classrooms. Sarner’s project, “Roaring Rothko” had students emulate the work of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, using chalk pastels applied and blended in color fields, while learning the basic tenets of color theory.

Its concepts focused on creative expression: connecting color with emotion, abstract painting, composition and organic shapes. Upon completion the students are asked appropriate grade level questions: to reflect on their work and aesthetic value such as how they felt while creating, colors used and why, comparing their picture to Rothko’s, and to reflect on Rothko’s work and ponder what the artist was trying to convey. 

These lessons guide and support students to interrogate their own thoughts and feelings and affirms the child’s aesthetic comprehension, engaging both their brains’ reward systems and personal histories.

It also emulates the introspection Sarner incorporates into her work. Truth and the gesture are important to Sarner. Many of her works convey a journey and much more, with her broad strokes, powerful colors, smudges and her migratory and at times restless lines inviting the viewer to look deeper. The results from Sarner’s contemplations in Echoes and Emergence signify “a lens, a way of understanding the arc of my own becoming.”

Next, she plans to spend time in solitude and explore artist residencies to deepen her understanding of how to visually express the nervous system. She aims to research and develop gestures that honestly illustrate states like stress or happiness in her work.

Her goal is to develop a body of work rooted in self-discovery and archival connections. Then, she will do an installation on “feeling the art.” She wants people to connect with themselves and feel heard. Indeed, Sarner noted, her dream job is to be an art therapist.

Details: pvartcenter.org and www.instagram.com/robinjackart