Sara Ossana
LAND + SEA
ON VIEW:
November 2, 2024 - January 4, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION:
Saturday, November 9th, 3:00 - 5:00PM
A meditation on place-making, land and sea act as vessels of memory. Topography as text—land unfolds as living memory, while water emerges as both metaphor and matter. These elements intertwine to explore themes of embodiment, ecological consciousness, Indigenous knowledge, and belonging.
The work embraces the tension between abundance and austerity, migration and rootedness, presence and absence. Each gesture evokes the liminal space between states—where land and sea meet, place takes shape across shifting landscapes.
This exhibition invites viewers to inhabit these in-between spaces, tracing connections between human experience and natural elements, allowing the narratives embedded in the matter that surrounds us, the elemental, to emerge and embrace us.
About the Artist:
Originally from Arizona, Sara splits their time between Rhode Island and Arizona. A queer-identifying creative, Sara is committed to a personal legacy that interrogates and reframes the American origin story through the lens of the American Southwest, using objects, space, and material culture. Recently named to the Wallpaper USA 400, which celebrates individuals shaping America’s creative landscape, Sara is also a passionate advocate for American design, craft, and manufacturing. Their understanding of 'America' extends beyond Western cartographies and borders—drawing from 'La Frontera' of the Southwest, embracing Indigenous identities along with radical Jotería and Muxerista expressions
Sara is a founding partner and former co-owner of O&G Studio, an award-winning design studio specializing in American-made contemporary furniture, with a mission to expand the collective American identity. They serve on the board of DESIGNxRI, a nonprofit economic development organization supporting design businesses. Sara’s work has been widely published both domestically and internationally, including in The World of Interiors, Architect’s Newspaper, Dwell, The New York Times, Interior Design, and Architectural Digest. They were also named one of Vogue’s 'Ten Contemporary Designers to Collect Today'.
Since 2019, Sara has been committed to mentoring young designers as a faculty member in both the Furniture Design and Interior Architecture Departments at RISD. They also served as a full-time faculty member in the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Department at Brown University, specializing in Scenography.
Sara has over 20 years of experience as a world-builder, scenographer, and champion of new works in theatre and performance. She recently was an artist in residence with William Kentridge and the Centre for the Less Good Idea at the Brown Arts Institute exploring spatialized dramaturgies.
Sara finds strength and agency in existing on the margins of many disciplines, the edges where the overlap occurs. IIt is within these liminal spaces and edges of uncertainty that the richest outcomes manifest.
Artist Statement:
I engage with objects, space, and materiality as tools for unlearning. My practice is an invocation of the elemental and the alchemical—a provocation through matter, time, and form. I immerse myself in the in-between: the liminal and restless where vulnerability, collaboration and emancipatory practices seek salvation in the form of the ecstatic.