Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work plays upon the tension between the whimsical, the beautiful, and the grotesque. Smiling faces stretch too wide. Frowns curve upwards. Eyes drift off-center. Bodies bend in ways that feel tender and slightly unstable. Humor becomes a strategy for coping. The work borrows from the visual vocabulary of children’s drawings, cartoons, memory, and devotional imagery, but it resists nostalgia. Instead, it asks what remains when optimism frays — what kind of magic persists in awkwardness, repetition, and emotional transparency.
Figures live inside the work — featuring winged creatures, hybrid bodies, star-headed beings, crying suns, and watchful butterflies — all stemming from intuitive feelings. They feel discovered rather than designed. I rarely plan a work before beginning; rather, I let the work evolve on its own.
I use saturated yet soft, almost childlike color as a disarming, welcoming device. Fluorescent yellows, warm pinks and reds, acidic greens, and bruised purples create a visual language that is playful on the surface but emotionally charged upon deeper inspection. The characters often smile and grimace at the same time, leaving the viewer conflicted and leading to further introspection. My beings hover between innocence and menace, celebration and collapse.
Text appears scattered throughout the works — phrases like “rain rain go away,” “you clearly never learned your lesson,” and “Happy Superbowl Sunday” — not as declarations, but as murmurs from within the image. They connect the works to lived experiences and shared memories, reading like half-remembered nursery rhymes or diary entries: looping, unresolved, and perpetual.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sarah Gerbasi is an artist & educator living in Milwaukee, WI. She hopes to leave one day!
© Sarah Gerbasi