Sacks utilizes diverse, work-a-day materials like cotton, burlap, lace, wood and cardboard, some fleetingly imprinted with poetic texts typed on the cloth by the artist using a manual typewriter. The artist also composes with fragments of Indian textiles, indigo blue cottons from South Africa, antique kimonos from Japan and embroidered linen from Normandy. The twisted, torn and joyful pieces of fabric evoke unfurled banners, flowing rivers, semaphores – and in this new series, the skyline of American cities. The recycling of fabrics from the global textile trade suggests the labor involved in their making, while intimating a sense of impermanence and loss, migration and diaspora. As Braun writes in the catalogue, Sacks has pushed collage beyond the modernist practices of Surrealist incongruity and post-war base materialism, making it the medium of a new, postcolonial syncretism.
Sperone Westwater
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