The paintings and installations of Sarah Cain employ a variety of materials including traditional canvas, stretcher bars, and paint, but also introducing unusual and poetic artifacts: from musical notations to leaves and branches, expanding outside of the two-dimensional plane of the canvas and into the surrounding environment, creating many site-specific installations. Critic Quinn Latimer in describing Cain's work writes "They court seemingly bad ideas — drawings sport feathers and doilies; installations feature eggs and hippy art teacher-like fabric swatches — and then transform them so deftly into serious painting that it can take a minute to understand what you’re looking at." In 2011, Cain collaborated with noted Beat-era artist George Herms at the Orange County Museum of Art, where the curator Sarah Bancroft wrote for the accompanying catalog that the two artists share "an interest in language and a frustration over its limits in describing abstract work" In 2011, Cain completed a major site-specific work in a former Masonic lodge in Marfa, Texas, for Los Angeles Nomadic Division. Titled Forget me not, the installation spread across the first floor of the building and explored the imagery of the forgot-me-not flower, used by Masons and later by Nazis. Exploring belief systems, doubt and faith, the paintings spread across the building's walls and floors. One large painting even incorporated an overturned cupboard into its composition. Such recycling and inclusion of domestic furniture has become a mainstay of Cain's practice; couches, chairs and benches figure large in her recent works. In 2015, she painted in red splatters a seat that her neighbor abandoned after his wedding was called off, calling it "Loveseat". She has had solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary, amongst others. And has been included in collective exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Imperial Belvedere Palace Museum in Vienna, and the Busan Biennale. In 2019, she completed her first major permanent public work at San Francisco International Airport: a 150-foot stained glass window with 270 colors, framed in soldered zinc, which was "painstakingly arranged so that no two adjoining fragments are the same shade." Poet Bernadette Mayer in her poem "Dear Sarah", described a painting by the artist as "it's like seeing a rainbow in the middle of the forest."
Selected Exhibitions
, 2017
, 2017
, 2015
, 2015
Painting in Place, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles, CA, 2013
