THE ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY

“Aquaphobia” is the fear of water. “Spacephobia” is the fear of outer space. Artist, Sarah Jane Pell, utilizes these fears in her experimental philosophy, “Aquabatics.” She uses extreme performance art in such areas as space and water to convey the anxiety of an uncertain technological future, while at the same time designing ways for humans to survive in these harsh conditions. Sarah is quite the multi-tasker.
Before I even chose Pell to research I was already biased towards her area of art: performance art. In my opinion, performance art is the most successful in portraying the artist’s intention(s) to the audience than any other art technique out there. So, when I began researching Sarah Jane Pell, I became particularly interested after finding out that she specializes in performance art, and not only that, she has also created her own form of it.
If I had not known that Sarah was an artist, I would have been confused as to whether she was an artist or a scientist. She has studied in several universities ranging from the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia to The Underwater Center in Fremantle and the International Space University in France. Her expertise simply in the arts reaches the PhD level, which she earned at the Edith Cowan University in Australia. So, is Sarah an artist, a diver, or an astronaut? In a sense, she is all three. Through her work as an artist she shows her knowledge of aquatics, space, and performance art.
Currently, her focus centers around using variations of underwater exploration to artistically convey her views on society and how she views the world; specifically, her artwork focuses on how the human body reacts when it is stressed. Her work is beautiful in its contradiction, that being in water allows the human body to be free of the everyday restrictions of living on Earth, while at the same time cutting us off from one of the most important necessities of life, air.
(I couldn’t paste the pictures for some reason. The “Underwater Angel” picture was a photo of a woman with a yellow wetsuit and the frame of large wings made out of what looks like metal; The other photo is of her huddled in a stretchy clear “bubble”.)
This first picture on the left shows her portrayal of the beauty of water and weightlessness of the human body in it; the piece of artwork is called “Underwater Angel”. On the right is a picture of one of Pell’s performance pieces that dramatizes the fragility of the human body. The performance involves Pell being encases in this spherical bubble that is vacuum-sealed. Viewers watch as she painstakingly moves along the ground, her breath becoming more and more pained as the amount of oxygen decreases with each breath. While the performance does not use water, it caused me to physically feel the fear in not being able to breathe, which could be the cause of a person’s fear of water.
In my opinion, Sarah Jane Pell represents what an artist represents to society today. In the past the artists was pictured more as the recorder of life to preserved for coming generations. These days artwork still records current life, but at the same time, more and more artists are using their creations as a microphone to scream their thoughts and ideas to the viewers. Artwork has become a platform to voice the creator’s feelings and beliefs, and many times, the artist uses this platform to reach to others to change the world and transform it. This theory is true for both Sarah Jane Pell and Zhang Huan. They are both artists who use their work as a way to voice their concerns of the world – politically, socially – and the future.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 11:09 pm and is filed under