Sarah Cain, You Aurora Borealis Me Too, Atrium Projects, at BAMPFA
Installation view: Atrium Projects / Sarah Cain: To—you know—you, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, October 30, 2025–June 6, 2027. Photo by Chris Grunder.
This review is part of our “Artist on Artist” series.
Micah Ballard is a poet living in San Francisco.
The review is presented in his own voice.
By Micah Ballard
Let's get to it, she haunts, in a great way. Erratic yet controlled beyond uncontrollable. Knowing but discovering only to find out maybe later. A vibrant life totally lived and thrown onto walls and floors to be painted over or kept in galleries or homes. A lover of poetry and taking chances, she does what she wants, whenever and however, regardless of the materials at hand. On a personal note, her work makes me feel like we just met under a vert skating ramp and we are instant friends. When I think of meeting Sarah, I remember meeting Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer, and George Herms.
Photo by Chris Grunder.
Sarah thrives in so many various places through permanent installations using diverse mediums. For instance, as in one of my favorites, which I always visit, We Will Walk up to the Sun at the Grand Hyatt Air Train Station at the San Francisco Airport. Her approach to stained glass looks almost like her paintings, but they are not. One gets the same feeling and to know that it’s always there, like she is, very calming. Also, I love how she invokes everything inside us, what some may call “the human condition,” a little bit of calmness, pleasure, anger, insecurity, etc. and communique with whatever is out there or what may come. One gets the sense of freedom from it all. You can step on the work, laugh with it, cry with it, and actually be a living part of it. Her stuff is yours and tells you about yourself because you are within it. It brings you in as an offering and offers you to think about yourself and your surroundings. You get to zone in on one thing, which is larger than you, but all about everything you didn’t know about yourself. Meditation through chaos and shapeshifting into other beings. From stained glass windows, spray paint, embroidery, painted sofas and relics, it's all multifarious and fresh, making atmospheres of continuous and inviting communal engagement.
Photo by Chris Grunder.
Sarah brings moments that are eternally there, as in her current on-site installation at BAMPFA. The work always changes and recreates itself as totally fresh. Evolving into a new self and other selves, the scenes switch and colors flash and disappear, but are there. As the poet John Wieners wrote, "as permanent as skin." Her seeming fantasies or frequencies are on point, like they say, as her life and art (spirit) embroiders. Figuring out things, thinking of broad or interrupted strokes, one of my favorite titles of hers is You Aurora Borealis Me.
More than anything, which is nothing while being, being everything, Sarah meets you where you're at like water, but you don't even know where you ARE. From paint drips on walls to threading objects into canvas, to finding jewels and making them hang onto things, she makes things seem exactly like themselves, but otherwise. My funniest memory of hanging out (so many) is in the Mission, early 2000s. She told me about trees, after busting me in New College, listening to Cat Power with Patrick [Dunagan]. Somehow, I was super embarrassed (never Pat), and she laughed so hard at us. A good, comfortable, hard, serious laugh, summoning and unsummoning, same timing.
Surprised, talked back to, feeling right at home, talking, arguing faintly about imagination, understanding one another through complicated but mutual overlapping conversations, we arrive as we can and help one another get through.
Photo by Chris Grunder.
After going to her SFMOMA Seca show in 2006, I skated home, went to the roof, and spray-painted my typewriter gold. Sarah has the affect. I remember her painting leaves, and now I see leaves differently. I don't know (kind of) what hallucination is, but they are all her trees and leaves. At BAMPFA Atrium Projects / Sarah Cain: To—you know—you she goes back into her bloodstream to create new scenes of emotive counterparts that trace together in splashes and unplanned nervousness that are continuous in her life, which is privately made public.
