Image

An image in two halves. The top, a glitched image of overgrown kudzu, and the bottom, light blue, pink, and yellow pixels. Both halves are overlaid with a topographical map of Appalachia.

Sarah Jane Cribbs

Shady Grove

What is a haunted house?

What makes it haunted?

What makes it a house?

I grew up in northern Appalachia. I sat in the back seat of my father’s car for trips from the Eastern foothills to the Western foothills of Pennsylvania mountains to visit my grandmother.

When my perception of the world grew larger as I did too, I began to hide my Appalachian identity. This ended as I began my practice, beginning with a realtime performance on artificial intelligence and queerness. Art practice opened up the possibility of critical play, a method of criticism that focuses on a playful attitude, both investigating and reflecting without the pressure of coming to a decisive conclusion. Critical play is looking, planning, thinking, dreaming about the future.

My works of criticism manifest out of the page/site/paper/screen and into audio and/or visual experiences. I began to study the Other, othered spaces, othered subjects. Appalachia is “American soil” and yet is an Other. And hologram gfs are Others, on one hand they do not exist yet, and on another they very much do. Women are Others, ghosts are Others. I chart how they haunt and who they haunt. They show me who haunts them, why. I can build a world, where the Other can still be the Other, and can play among Others. There is no utopia, but there is connection. For the Other, safety is connection. Today and always, I will choose touch and care, I will choose connection. 

As a research-based artist, my bibliographies gain autonomy, they grow and move and take a body through my work. They live out there, somewhere, choosing their paths, moving along, waiting for death. I give myself to transformative feminist futures.

Image

An image in two halves. The top, a glitched image of overgrown kudzu, and the bottom, light blue, pink, and yellow pixels. Both halves are overlaid with a topographical map of Appalachia.

Mile-a-Minute

Digital collage, glitch

2022

Graphic notation for the ballad "Mile-a-Minute"

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The pattern shows bright colors and a person with a butterfly hovering over their eyes. Moss and mountains expand from them, becoming a coal miner, a letter, a planet, and a rose. Red thin lines indicate how Cribbs cut the pattern into squares.

Quilt Pattern for Oak of Ash

Digital collage

2022

Cribbs used their digital collage practice to create a pattern for the quilt. They mapped a pattern onto the collage in one foot by one foot squares.  

Image

A quilt is pinned to a wall, many different patterns and colors form strange organic and geometric forms. A circle of warm light floods the quilt, it feels like a quiet, early morning in the mountains. On the edge of that circle, the quilt quickly dissolves into darkness.

Oak of Ash

Quilt

9.5'x9'

2022

Detail image of the quilt, Oak of Ash.

Image

A quilt, Oak of Ash, is hanging from the ceiling in a cylinder and is flushed with warm light. Overlaid is an image of flowers in spring time. Their yellows, reds, and oranges mingle with the warm tones of the light on the quilt.

Shady Grove

Digital collage of flowers in spring and a quilt.

2022

A fleeting documentation of the first cylindrical installation of Shady Grove