BIO
Sara Jessie Kane is an interdisciplinary artist working with image-based collage and mixed media. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at ArtPort (Kingston, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (LIC, New York), and Oldenburger Kunstverein ( Oldenburg, Germany) among others, and she has presented solo exhibitions in New York and Frankfurt, Germany. Kane received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and also studied at Parsons Paris and Instituto Allende in Mexico. Sara Jessie is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in NYC and also trained at the Art Students’ League and the New York Academy of Art during that time. She grew up in Queens, NY and lives and works in Long Island City.
STATEMENT
My work is made from layers of images gathered from everyday life. I use photographs I take while walking in my neighborhood, fragments of paintings I’ve made in the studio, and screenshots pulled from online streaming content. These sources are combined until their original context begins to blur. What remains is an image that feels familiar, but not easily placed.
I also layer in photographs drawn from my family’s multi-generational creative history: my grandmother’s chemistry laboratory, my mother’s practice of building miniature rooms, and my daughter’s character designs. These materials aren’t treated as symbols or narratives, but as visual evidence of making, experimenting, and imagining across time.
Although the finished works often appear organic, they are built from a mix of hand-made and found digital material. I’m interested in how personal experience, inherited knowledge, and mass-produced imagery sit side by side, and how meaning shifts as images are reused and reassembled.