Gallery 787 presents
Sarah Umles: Errata
March 30–April 15, 2024

Opening Reception
Saturday, March 30th
6-8pm

Errata is an exhibition of works produced by Pasadena-based artist Sarah Umles between 2020 and 2024—a precarious period of time anchored by a global pandemic, during which we collectively turned more intensely to our screens as the primary mode through which we could safely navigate daily life; and followed by a reemergence into life AFK (cyber-jargon meaning “Away From Keyboard”), wherein the body could re-build its relationship with the physical world.

Umles’s art practice deals with the absurdities that lie at the intersection of technology, visual media, material culture, and consumerism. Through screen captures, product images, readymades, and QR-coded content, Umles confronts how screen-based experiences inform (and deform) our cultural identities, social constructs, and senses of self.

At the crux of Errata is Umles’s fascination with the algorithmic oddities, accidental abstractions, and slippages that occur in the virtual spaces we inhabit every day. What happens when the digital tools we’re so heavily reliant upon inevitably falter or fail us entirely? Umles also takes an interest in those glitches that bleed into our analog lives. Her work aims to disrupt the relationship between body and screen, evoking open-ended questions around how we come to understand ourselves and the world around us. How does “the glitch” perform, beyond its technological context, as a greater existential point of inquiry?