Holly Fisher on Sean Sarmiento

lovely, lonely , 2023, archival metallic luster pigment print, 13 x 19 in.

Sean Sarmiento works in photo-based, digital, and analog collage to alter architectural and photographic norms that reflect his own questions of identity, queerness, and domesticity. Relics of the past, such as frayed leather, upcycled magazine clips, and thrifted stamps frequent Sarmiento’s collages as tools to interrogate what lies in-between the feelings of home and foreignness. In his 2023 debut solo show, Somewhere No One Knows My Name, butchered fragments of self-portraits are paired with inclusions of the artist’s poetry that suggest a yearning for physical, sexual, and emotional self-discovery. At the same time, warm tones and abstracted photos of his childhood home connect the immediacy of introspection to the comfort of nostalgia. 

Sarmiento recently finished a six-month residency at Arts District in San Diego’s Liberty Station where he explored different ways of expressing the feeling of home in new-found places, experiences, and collaborations. In his recent body of work, Sarmiento is unbound by the need to document literal elements of the home.  His current interpretation of home does not necessarily lie in the normative architecture of domestic spaces, but rather in the expansivity of self-discovery. Through experimentation, the artist reaches for the metaphoric, discovering that home is not a static setting, but a collection of experiences that culminate to form one’s relationship to self and their environment. 

In the piece, lovely, lonely, produced in 2023, Sarmiento overlays multiple photos of his childhood home. The repetition of these photos obscure domestic symbols such as vintage wallpaper, warm table lamps, and layers of velvet, leather, wood, and linen textures. A transparent photo of a picture frame presents as a light leak on expired film, while a brighter streak of sunlight illuminates a wooden floor. The rhythm of light, both natural and artificial, projects a connotation of warmth throughout the piece. An excerpt of the artist’s poetry, handwritten in cursive, is rotated vertically to act more as an aesthetic pattern rather than reading material. However, the writing challenges the viewer to spend more time with the piece, engaging with the collage from an altered perspective if read. In the central rectangle, a sliver of Sarmiento’s arm and shoulder is revealed. The composition of his body focuses our attention to his hand, relaxed and outstretched, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Reaching toward the unattainable, Sarmiento presents as if he is striding towards a realm of faded memories. In his earlier works, these domestic symbols serve as representations for self discovery, interrogating the intersection between the body and the comfort of home. It is an exploration that successfully sets in place a series of new questions for the artist: what does it mean to feel at home? Can home be, at once, foreign and familiar? What can revive feelings of home in new experiences? 

BANG!, 2024, archival luster pigment print, 24 x 36 in.

Exploring a highly saturated color palette and natural patterns, Sarmiento documents what he describes as his “eagerness to be out in the world.” This eagerness stems from a trip to Colombia taken at the beginning of 2024, during which the artist met relatives for the first time, and experienced a culture that felt uniquely personal and foreign. Gaining perspective on his own ancestral roots and experiencing a wider worldview through travel encouraged Sarmiento to divert his subject matter outward. Moving from an introspective reflection towards a more spontaneous collection of photographs, Sarmiento documents an experimental approach to finding identity in the unfamiliar. 

The collage BANG! documents Sarmiento’s recent trip to Joshua Tree National Park. The jagged edges of the photograph placed on a larger red plane resembles a land mass itself, like an organic border of a country. The radiance of the red background seems to reverberate off the page and floods the photo of boulders with a feeling of urgency. In contrast to his prior neutral tones, red expresses the immediacy of Sarmiento’s change in perception of his environment. Within the frayed edges of the photograph, a molten-like, black cavity interrupts the rhythm of the boulders. The negative mass is a still from the artist’s older 16mm film. The film was an experiment in itself, which produced a painterly haze of dark colors rather than any representational imagery. Using a previous experiment to alter the representation of a new experience, Sarmiento finds a bridge between the past and the present, the self and the environment. Sarmiento compares this shape to a bullet hole that punctures memories of the trip and landscape. Although the colors, shapes, and subject matter allow a stark displacement from the domestic, the motif of memories persists throughout Sarmiento’s work through his choice of medium. 

Claro, 2024, wallpaper, polaroid, and stamp, 8.5 x 11 in.

While diverse travel experiences inspired Sarmiento’s diversion from domestic representation, his mediums continue to unite memories of the past to the present. Along with thrifted stamps, leather, and magazine clips, polaroids have been a consistent element in Sarmiento’s work. When asked about the significance of polaroids, Sarmiento states that he appreciates the instant gratification that comes from shooting and printing photos in present time. Instantaneity, when compared to the theme of nostalgia, creates a dialogue of time that connects his previous urge to represent faded memories with his current commitment to documenting new experiences. In Claro, Sarmiento layers a polaroid of a cropped self-portrait on a strip of upcycled wallpaper and a vintage stamp. The piece consists mostly of negative white space, placing focus on the similar patterns that appear in the wallpaper and artist’s clothing. The repetition of pattern and colors creates a visual conversation between the two mediums and the moments in which they were produced. The wallpaper serves as a symbol of nostalgic domesticity, while the polaroid allows Sarmiento to capture his body in an unaltered representation of the present.

The alluring aesthetics of nostalgia and domesticity are presented throughout Sarmiento’s work to produce pieces that are, at once, mementos of the past and personal explorations of the present. Throughout his residency at Arts District, Sarmiento experimented with colors, shapes, and patterns to express his new found appreciation for home in the unfamiliar. Using regenerative techniques, such as thrifting old materials and reusing older works, Sarmiento remains committed to creating work that connects to his past. However, in his current experiments, Sarmiento also utilizes photos of the landscape and polaroids to reference the experiential. The evolution of his previous and more experimental works will be on view at an upcoming exhibition, All the Places We Belong, at Arts District Liberty Station this March. Here, Sarmiento’s provocation of distant, yet familiar, memories are juxtaposed with his documentation of current experiences to expand the limits of home.  

-Holly Fisher