Things Worth Saving
Dreamsong Gallery - Minneapolis, MN
May 3 - June 15, 2024

In Things Worth Saving, Dreamsong’s second solo exhibition with Sarah Thibault (b. 1980, Minneapolis), the artist presents a series of vivid new landscape paintings. In luminous palettes of feverish orange, humid pinks and blues, and neon purple, they depict trees, mountains, and volcanoes as embodiments of a vast range of human emotion and spirituality. Licked by fire and imbued with tenderness, Thibault’s landscapes highlight both nature’s precarity and its unique capacity to heal. An unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night (2024) is part of a series of paintings Thibault developed based on her plein air studies of the McFall Oak in Glendale’s Deukmejian Wilderness on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Threatened by the Station Fire in 2009 – LA County’s largest ever wildfire – the majestic 150-year-old oak was heroically saved by firefighters. Named in honor of the city manager who coordinated the rescue effort, the McFall Oak stands as a testament to bravery and marks a rare instance where nature’s gifts were recognized and valiantly preserved. Charging the tree with a kind of talismanic power and mysticism, Thibault uses the its majestic canopy as a ground for saturated experiments in color, positioning draping limbs and leaves as places of respite.

The threat of wildfire also looms in An unknown plant blooms, singing (2024) which like the McFall Oak paintings, takes its title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems and letters. A largescale landscape of the shrubland that blankets LA’s canyons, the painting is aflame, possessing an interior radiance that suggests a heightening of emotion, danger, and perception. Centered around a lens flare – the circular scattering of bright light hitting a camera’s lens – the paintings’ hills, trees, and shrubs lie perilously close to an everwarming sun. The dichotomy between nature’s comforting beauty and its inherent violence reaches an apex in Thibault’s volcano paintings.

Where her trees and landscapes are built with fields of dry brushed color to capture the permeated intensity of earthen and arboreal surfaces, the volcano paintings’ gestural brushstrokes roil and exude, breaking free from the land. Small and fierce, these works bring the fire underlying Thibault’s landscapes to the surface, igniting her hot palette of blazing orange and letting it burn. - Gregory Smith, Director of Dreamsong Gallery