Sarah Amos' new works on paper offer a uniquely pre-modern glimpse on a post-modern landscape.  The artist was born in Australia, and takes inspiration from the traditional aboriginal dot painting of the outback.  Such work immortalizes the poignant particularities of the desert landscape-- the valley where a great uncle died, or the mountain where a second cousin ascended as a boy and descended as a man.  These intimate histories are each inscribed in a precise and abstract language of dots and lines that have recently been celebrated by the champions of Western modernism for their formal resonances with minimalist production. 

But how can this traditional, albeit abstract, language be used to talk about modern landscapes?  A highway takes the place of a lake.  Amos' genius lies in her talent to translate urban architecture into the organic calligraphy of symbolic aboriginal place-making.  Grids suggest a third dimension where for centuries there were only two.  Her large pieces are at once poetic and provocative, pretty enough even to ignore the complex history that informs them.

- Sophia Powers

 (*Images, from top to bottom:  Sarah Amos, Works on Paper, November 15 - December 22, 2007; Reeves Contemporary, Sun Tides, 2007, collagraph and mixed media, 96 x 95 inches, Courtesy of Artist and Reeves Contemporary. Sarah Amos, Works on Paper, November 15 - December 22, 2007; Reeves Contemporary, Where is the Water, 2007, collagraph and mixed media, 76 x 95 inches, Courtesy of Artist and Reeves Contemporary. Sarah Amos, Works on Paper, November 15 - December 22, 2007; Reeves Contemporary, One Hundred , 2007, collagraph and mixed media, 77 x 95 inches, Courtesy of Artist and Reeves Contemporary.)