Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart does not play it safe. One look at her photographs confirms she is a woman undaunted. In the pursuit of defining her photographic voice, she attempts the difficult and the dangerous, the fanciful and the outlandish, with equal determination.
Born in Toronto in 1995, Sage grew up in Ottawa. She earned a BFA in Animation at Concordia in 2018, where she initially enrolled in drawing courses. Candidly admitting that drawing was frustrating and she “wasn’t very good at it,” Sage segued into photography, making generic commercial photographs for an Instagram influencer. With no formal intention for developing a body of work, Sage created wildly offbeat images using herself as the subject, and posted them to Instagram simply as diary entries. “I was trying to figure out who I was as a photographer”, she recalls.
In an unexpected turn of events, her mother played a pivotal role in launching Sage informally into the world of art photography by submitting Sage’s images to a free booth at an art fair in Toronto. Sage remembers producing “6 or 7 small prints, and they all sold - it was totally surprising !”
There is a dreamlike quality to Sage’s work, owing perhaps to an underlying surrealist influence in her distinctive style. By common definition, figurative surrealism presents irrational juxtapositions of objects. In one picture, raccoons cavort with her in the night, nipping at French baguettes made into a garment she wears in her series, “I Think You Dropped Something”.
In her recent exhibition, ‘Revelation’, Sage is seen leaping from a too-high fence, in a nightgown, surrounded by toy airplanes suspended randomly throughout the scene, a moody night sky above and oddly coloured, opaque windows behind. Afraid of heights, the whole undertaking terrified her, and yet, undaunted, she got the shot.
The subconscious imagination plays a prominent role in Sage’s inspiration, resulting in tableaus resembling absurdist dramas. Questions about meaning, identity, and purpose germinate in her internal dialogue, with subsequent proposals emerging from her lens. In Toronto’s largest outdoor photographic exhibition, recently held in the Distillery District, Sage’s work from her series ‘Good Stuff, Bad Stuff’, showcased her “use of physical experiences and found objects .. to explore the relationship between ourselves and the personal objects we buy, inherit, and throw away.”
She grapples with expressing thoughts in words, and finds it “easier to say it in photos”-- a propensity largely underpinning her artistic process. Sage begins a project by selecting a subject that interests her, then tries to “create one uncontrollable element to harness energy, and feel like you’re there.” The images reflect her deeply personal documentation and interpretation of the chaos of life.
To help examine her world, Sage relies on pop music lyrics and television as a tool for inspiration. For her, these are “accessible, and user-friendly.” Sage points to watching MTV’s early 2000’s show ‘Jackass’ as the genesis for her stunt-based images. “Stunts are appealing to use in order to talk about themes, such as plastic pollution or emotions,” she clarified.
Plastic waste has become an engrossing subject, finding its way into her psyche and photographs. In an interview with Life Framer, Sage explained, “Trash piling up everywhere can be harmful and scary but it also imbues a kind of magic-realism to natural landscapes. The interaction between nature and plastic is creating a whole new reality that no one has ever seen before.”
In her series, ‘Urban Stream’, Sage photographed herself floating in a dirty stream strewn with discarded plastic shopping bags, wearing only a scant Dollarama plastic bag she found at the site, and fashioned into a swimsuit.
“People will look back at now as an era, and a thousand years from now, archeological digs will unearth plastic.” She fears that is how present civilization is and will be perceived, and so strives to visually articulate urgent commentaries. With some despair, she believes “garbage is a core identity, as much as culture and heritage.”
Mathew Rosenblatt, Co-Founder of the Distillery Restaurants Corporation in Toronto thinks Sage “is a (mad) genius”. (sic) Her gallerist, Michael Gibson of Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Ontario, isn’t quite sure how to categorize her work. Each photo takes roughly a month to execute. The work is painstaking, fraught with physical discomfort, is solitary and meets with failure or suspicion time and again.
For herself alone however, the successes are immensely validating. Whether canvassing her imagination, or directing her own chimerical scenes, Sage’s fearless approach to photography yields powerful contemporary narratives. And in them, we witness her stark thoughts writ large, and unobstructed feelings laid bare.
— Peppa Martin for Photo Ed Magazine, Winter 2019/2020 Issue