Opening Reception:
Saturday, October 11, 2025
4–6PM
Artist talk 5PM with Catherin Taft, Deputy Director & Curator of The Brick
Various Small Fires (VSF) proudly announces Blue in the hands of prospect, Sarah Zapata's first solo show with the gallery at VSF OC. Zapata is a Peruvian-American textile artist raised in Evangelical Texas. She combines sculptural and textile techniques to create vibrant, monumental, abstract landscapes. Inspired by her Peruvian heritage and feminist theory, Zapata’s body of work addresses issues of labor, systems of power and control, cultural relativism, Queerness, and the intersectionality of identity.
“It is thought that warps and wefts were used as guides to help create the Nazca lines; weaving will always be guiding our bodies, adorning the space that encloses our bodies, reflecting how space defines our sense of time. Imperfect grids enabled some of the finest geometric linework of the world, initially thought to be roads, but instead honored the land through the act of structuring the landscape. Sometimes we are the spider, sometimes we are the fly. We were always meant to be bored; thinking cannot only flourish when the web is being spun. It is through fantasy and the suspension of time that we will only be able to access what is next. Not by absolving the ballasts of futurism, but by building our own arborescence. How do we define personhood? Not by hierarchies or the social contract, but by our humanness that transcends and defines innovation, rather than the latter destroying us. We are empty, we are built, we are many things, but we are not undone; we are a landscape that expands past material. It is here that we are Blue in the hands of prospect, that we are in spaces always surrounded by spiders, accessing something that has not yet been dreamed, yet cannot be unimagined.” -Sarah Zapata
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Sarah Zapata (b. 1988 Corpus Christi, TX) has had solo exhibitions at Arizona State University Museum (2024) in Tempe, Arizona, Galleria Poggiali (2023) in Milan, Italy, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2023) in Kansas City, Missouri, amongst many others. Her work was featured in a solo presentation at the UBS Art Studio at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. Zapata’s work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Barbican Centre (2024) in London, England, at the Stedelijk Museum (2024) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, at Kasmin Gallery (2024) in New York, NY, at Lisson Gallery (2023) in New York, NY, at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum (2023) in New York, NY, and at the Museum of Arts and Design (2023) in New York, NY. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest Mexico, Artsy, The New York Times, OBRA, Elephant Magazine, PIN-UP, Galerie, BOMB Magazine, and New York Magazine.