the story never stops beginning or ending

Sara Jimenez creates site-specific installations inspired by her research on Southeast Asia and the United Kingdom and her genealogical roots in both of those places. Through sculpture, collage, and performance, Jimenez makes visible the forgotten, hidden, or ignored histories and narratives of her ancestors. The potent yet ethereal force of memory pervades her work and is a palpable presence in the exhibition.

In her installation at BMAC, Jimenez uses the highly tactile mediums of textiles and ceramics, combining them with collaged photographic imagery from old American textbooks to conjure an intimate space that feels imbued with memory and connected to history, yet also untethered from our understanding of reality. The collaged landscape is layered and chaotic, collapsing space and leaving us feeling disjointed and uncertain.

Jimenez juxtaposes this precarious environment with the grounded solidity of ceramic forms, using clay to form a series of arches serving as memorials to Filipino women and non-binary individuals who lived during the American colonization of the Philippines. We also encounter some of these people in photographic images on an adjacent wall, often partially obscured or emerging from the layers of architecture and natural landscape.

The handmade nature of the ceramic relief sculptures evokes a feeling of care and tenderness. We can imagine the artist’s hand sculpting and forming the works—the act of creation becoming an offering of solace. 

— Sarah Freeman, curator

Artist Statement

This installation of textiles and ceramics honors Filipino women who lived when the Philippine Islands were part of the United States. It is meant to be a site of rest and reflection, paying homage to individuals whose legacies have been overlooked and connecting geographies and stories across oceans.

The concept of the installation responds to a specific monument in Vermont: two steel Krupp guns displayed on the lawn of the Statehouse in Montpelier. These guns are war relics from the Spanish-American War’s Battle of Manila Bay, which led to the U.S. buying the Philippines as a territory and owning it for the next 50 years. The guns are symbols of conquest and emblems of the machinery that expanded American power overseas. 

I am interested in constructing otherworldly spaces that rearrange the histories we have been taught. The space that my installation occupies is the former ladies’ powder room of a train station that has since been transformed into the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. As a nod to the feminine, and to the idea of a private space, I have focused on women and feminine non-binary individuals from the Philippines, some of whom are named and acknowledged in various archives; others only appear as images in colonial texts.

The black-and-white imagery in the story never stops beginning or ending is sourced and collaged from photographs in American textbooks published after the Philippines became a colony of the U.S. Each of the 80 intimately sized ceramic arches depicts an individual Filipino femme who lived during American colonial rule. The number 80 refers to the number of years the Philippines has been a sovereign nation—since July 4, 1946, the same day and month as America’s Independence Day.

— Sara Jimenez

About the Artist

Sara Jimenez’s work gives form to histories that are often unseen or forgotten, exploring the shifting connections between ancestors, land, memory, and the present. Working across installation, sculpture, collage, and performance, she creates fantastical environments and otherworldly, biomorphic objects that transform these histories into visual metaphors.

Drawing from her kaleidoscopic connection to her genealogical roots in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the ancient United Kingdom, Jimenez considers how histories change as they move between places and generations, and how forms of memory can exist outside official records.

She draws on archival sources, historical narratives, family histories, and material culture, while also attending to the gaps and silences within official histories. She is interested in forms of resistance and survival that are often overlooked, including the preservation of knowledge, movement through landscapes, and the transmission of cultural memory.

Jimenez uses color, abstraction, and fantastical forms to complicate conventional ideas of monuments and memorials. Rather than presenting history as fixed or complete, her installations consider how objects can transform meaning and unearth history, while her sculptures create alternative ways of remembering. Her site-responsive projects extend this inquiry by responding to the particular histories, architectures, and landscapes of the places where they are made.

Sara Jimenez received her BA from the University of Toronto and her MFA from Parsons School of Design at The New School. Selected solo exhibitions include Rachel Uffner Gallery, Smack Mellon, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, all in New York City. Selected commissions include Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Wave Hill in New York; and MadArt Studio in Seattle. Jimenez has also exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Bronx Museum. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. Selected awards and grants include the Canadian Women’s Artist Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Colene Brown Art Prize from BRIC (Brooklyn Information & Culture). Jimenez is represented by Chozick Family Art Gallery in New York City.