Other Worlds: Rebecca Sharp, Joani Tremblay, Sabrina Piersol, Zoe McGuire, Jolie Ngo

Essay by Courtenay Finn

Finn is currently Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, and a former Curator at the Aspen Art Museum

“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse,” artist Leonora Carrington once said. Working alongside Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, within a movement that came to be defined as Surrealism, female artists were asserting their power to make images rather than merely inspire them. Carrington was just one of many women reimagining the body as an open-ended field of poetic associations—merging science, magic, and mysticism. Born out of the uncertainty, instability, and radical events of the 1920s—the devastation of World War I, changes in medicine and technology, new art forms like Cubism and jazz—Surrealism was rooted in the philosophy that dreams and reality would merge into “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.” But for women artists, it was more than just a movement; it was also a means to explore identity, autonomy, and the subconscious by reclaiming their own narratives. 

Other Worlds presents work by five female-identifying artists that demonstrates the ongoing impact of Surrealism since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. Though often referenced as a historical movement, Surrealism’s use of dream imagery, probing of the unconscious mind to reflect on political and social issues, and embrace of magic, alchemy, and esoteric symbolism continue to be employed by artists today. Fast forward a hundred years and, just like the Surrealists before them, the artists in Other Worlds are exploring the human condition during a period of great social and political instability.

"Revealing hidden orders and unseen truths, the exhibition offers an image of reality that is both familiar and uncanny, strange and marvelous, fraught and freeing. Working across painting and sculpture, the exhibiting artists offer us pathways and portals to new worlds, imagining and constructing spaces far beyond those in which we currently reside."

Rebecca Sharp’s delicate, intimate compositions propel us forward into landscapes reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland; places where up is down, inside is out, and windows are doors to new worlds. Intricately rendered, Sharp’s paintings are absent of figures but populated by the residue of lives lived. Everyday objects are seemingly out of place and out of context, their disquieting peculiarity heightened by the painting’s intimate square framing. Sharp’s use of vivid colors and dreamlike distortion offers up new narratives, fragments of worlds dreamed and/or still becoming. Her psychological interiors echo our contemporary moment, one in which we inhabit and navigate multiple identities, moving seamlessly between the virtual and the real.

Sabrina Piersol’s paintings draw from the ancient traditions of magic, astrology, folklore, and spiritualism to render worlds in which forests, fields, and flowers hum with hidden consciousness. Delicate, understated colors and animated brushstrokes reveal the cosmos not as an unreachable abstraction, but as an open, accessible field of knowledge. Piersol grounds the mystical within our tactile, lived experience by creating landscapes that, like enchanted realms, embrace and envelop us. Petals beckon like stairs, while lush, organic forms dance across the canvas like astral bodies from the mountains or high desert. These cosmic abstractions are poetic meditations on the ongoing cycle of growth and decay, offering us a moving reminder of the fragility of life. 

Like the magic mirrors of fantasy, Zoe McGuire’s paintings transport us to other dimensions, revealing hidden truths and desires. Illuminating one world while extending a pathway to another, her paintings pose questions about the limits of our desire and the potential that dreams, stories, and visions offer us to journey to new dimensions. Shimmering veils of light pull us into McGuire’s landscapes, which, though they lie just beyond our reach, offer the promise of light at the end of a mythical, magical journey. Like the fairy tales and storybooks of youth, McGuire’s paintings offer a vision of reality beyond the material world, echoing Surrealist artist Remedios Varo’s declaration that “the dream world and the real world are the same.”

Working with tools and techniques that mine the past (traditional ceramics) and the present (3D printing), Jolie Ngo creates vessels and forms that mix and match colors, patterns, and textures to produce kaleidoscopic, otherworldly objects. Operating as stand-ins for the body—avatars for a world experienced both in person and on-screen—Ngo’s sculptures occupy the hybrid state of our current moment, decidedly neither here nor there. Emphasizing the intricate relationship between the “handmade” and the “machine-made,” the artist’s works refuse the notion of singularity, reminding us that human reality is infinitely more layered and complex. In Ngo’s practice, the surface of the screen can be read as an extension of the clay and our own skin; a space full of possibility for contact, connectivity, and communication.

Operating like an otherworldly interpreter of our current moment, Other Worlds reveals how the Surrealism movement’s visual language continues to shape our present. The artists remind us that Surrealism’s power lies not in its relationship to the past, but in its capacity to imagine and create new futures. A hundred years later, what continues is an evolving lineage that embraces Surrealist artist and writer André Breton’s belief that “over time the true revolutions will be carried out through the power of images.” Just like the Surrealists, the artists in this exhibition remind us that we must first imagine other worlds before we can summon them into being. At the core of their work is the importance of the dream—an emblem of an alternate, more authentic reality and a poetic, poignant reminder that imagination is a form of liberation.

—Courtenay Finn