Sabrina Raaf upcoming solo show

Upcoming solo show "Sabrina Raaf" at LIMN Gallery, San Francisco
June 1st - July 15th, 2007

Sabrina Raaf will exhibit recent photographs, as well as mechanical and robotic installations. Raaf’s experimental art is often interactive and always metaphoric evoking a powerful sense of displacement.. Raaf isn’t just combining art and technology, she is working with data, monitoring the environment and creating art that gets us to think about our place in the world.
Her series of photographs “Tests People” comes from a future place in time where a capacity for flight (or controlled antigravity) has been developed in humans and the boundaries are being studied and tested. It becomes an awkward struggle between the subjects and the strictly gravity-based architecture of their domestic environments.

“With an ever-increasing amount of technology intended to "improve", "augment", and/or "add convenience" to our busy lives, there seems to be less of an emphasis on creating devices to reflect or comment on our natural or built environments. Taking this challenge as a starting point with her work, Chicago-based artist, Sabrina Raaf, examines the seemingly "invisible" elements of modernized and technologically equipped spaces by re-interpreting this covert data through mechanized objects that create feedback in the form of sound or other visual outputs. From exploring live data sets in the immediate gallery space with "Translator II: Grower", a robot that measures carbon dioxide levels and draws corresponding blades of grass on the wall, to exploring the tension between humans and adaptive or automated systems with "Dry Translator", Raaf's work exposes the unspoken conflicts between society's push for technological autonomy and the struggle to retain human emotion and sensibility. Her most current work, "Icelandic Rift" comments on the almost "alien" nature of future forms of agriculture that could exist in zero-gravity environments. Gizmodo recently caught up with Raaf to discuss her unique and calculated artistic approach to creating work that not only challenges common perceptions of technological utopia, but also examines just how deeply we've become entrenched in high-tech fetishism.”

Interview/Article by Jonah Brucker-Cohen


Name: Sabrina Raaf
Education: MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art and Technology, 1999
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Electronic Visualization, School of Art and Design, UIC, Chicago, IL, USA

Exhibitions: Sabrina Raaf is a Chicago-based artist working in experimental sculptural media and photography. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in 2005-6 at the Wendy Cooper Gallery (Chicago), Mejan Labs (Stockholm), Espace Landowski (Paris), Ars Electronica (Linz), Opel Villas Foundation Art Center (R sselsheim), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), San Jose Museum of Art, and the Museum Tinguely (Basel). She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 & 2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary.


www.limn.com or www.raaf.org