Fitted out with infra-red film, which produces sharp contrasts between glaring white and deep black, Sarite Sanders took off for Egypt to bring us a new take on the ruined scenes of ancient glory that were so dear to the hearts and eyes of nineteenth-century travel photographers. Although she references the old school in her studies of temples, statuary, obelisks, colossi and friezes at close and mid-range, Sanders’s images are decidedly surreal and often seductively eerie, as her subjects seem to come alive in a world that we never see with our naked eyes. Sanders’ stunning take of the “Striding Colossi of Ramesses II” with columns bathed in blinding light against a black sky scarred by an unearthly super-grainy cloud bank recalls the old Flash Gordon flicks that imagined distant and forbidding planets. At the antipodes of a documentary, Sanders’s series is arresting neo-Orientalist visual fantasy. (Michael Weinstein)
A New Vision: A Review of Milwaukee's Sarah Ball Allis Art Museum Curator Kate E. Schaffer has gathered a group of works by femme, women and nonbinary artists that interacts, intervenes and innovates with the museum’s permanent collection to reveal the life of the explorer, traveler, caretaker and collector Sarah Ball Allis.
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