Biography

Sara Wentworth is a multimedia artist, composer, designer, and engineer based in New York. She creates multimedia installations and interactive, multichannel audio-visual systems for live performance, as well as composing music for herself and for other musicians.

Her work is rooted in collage aesthetic, creating works in which disparate elements are glued together via technology. She draws from modularity, minimalism, and indeterminacy to blend the old with the new, analog with digital, image with sound, and sound with space. Collaboration and Improvisation are integral to her creative process, through which she creates richly textured, layered pieces ranging from simple and melodic to noisy and chaotic.

Sara has shown work and performed collaboratively and as a solo artist internationally, including Columbia University, New York University, Dixon Place, Here Arts Center, 3-Legged Dog, and The DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival in New York City: CIT School of Music, University College Cork, Dublin City University, Trinity College, NUI Galway, The Cork Opera House, The Everyman Theatre, The Granary Theatre, The Firkin Crane, and The Contemporary Music Centre in Ireland: The Old Athens Bourse as part of the ICMC in Athens, and IRCAM as part of ManiFeste in Paris.

Artistic Statement

I create interdisciplinary work that has included multimedia installations, interactive audio-visual environments for live music and dance performances, and music composition for myself and for others.

I am attracted to collage aesthetic, theory, and methods. I take joy in the juxtaposition, re-contextualization, and reverse engineering of technology and subject matter to elicit new narratives, sounds, and imagery. I create collages using technology, rather than glue, to join disparate elements and mediums.  I draw from modularity, minimalism, and indeterminacy to blend the old with the new, analog with digital, image with sound, and sound with space. I fragment, isolate, and reconstruct my material in order to disassociate it from its original context. I utilize chaos, within bounds, as a creative practice in order to extract new ideas, thought processes, and methods of creating, curating the results that resonate into a final piece. I believe that these methods have the power to destabilize unexamined ideas and habits, to highlight synchronicities and absurdities, and to evoke beauty and dissonance.

Collaboration and improvisation are invaluable to my creative practice. Working collaboratively across disciplines has strongly informed my methodology, allowing me to draw from a wide range of ideas and techniques. I value improvisation as a means to establish a dialogue with collaborators, and as a method to conjure ideas and methods on my own as a solo artist.

I believe that more truth can be found in a discourse than in a conclusion: therefore I intend for my work to be dialectic rather than didactic. I don’t wish to explicitly tell my audience what to think or how to feel, but to create what Umberto Eco termed an “Open Work,” leaving room for interpretation by my performers and by my audience. College, collaboration, and improvisation serve to keep my work and methods open and dialectic.

I believe that the function of art is to help us understand ourselves and the world around us: that it has the power to foster inner peace and empathy for others, and to connect us to our communities and the world at large. Through my work, I look for truth, meaning, and connection. Often drawing inspiration from science, philosophy, psychology, and mythology, my work is driven by a desire to analyze and understand human needs, motivations, and behaviors. In doing so, I hope to work toward a world where we might better live in harmony with ourselves and with others in this vast, living, chaotic collage we call humanity on earth.