Origin Story
November 5 - December 5, 2020
Virtual Solo Exhibit Opens Online November 5, 5pm
Origin Stories by Amy Sabrin (virtual)
Before there were words, humans were making art. Before there was written language, humans were painting symbols on cave walls. And at the dawn of our species, individual humans were recording their existence in the form of handprints, which are found in caves on every continent on earth. In one cave in Spain, indeed, there is a wall with negative handprints of 50 individual men, women and children, which are 40,000 years old. My series “Origin Stories” was inspired by my visit to these caves in Spain and France. There I was deeply moved to see, in the flickering light, the beautifully observed pre-historic animals painted or engraved in abundance by the earliest humans. These first artists, however, deliberately chose not to depict fully-formed individuals of their own species, but rather used symbols or cartoonish stick figures to refer to humans. The negative handprints are to me the most mysterious and evocative. These symbols, cartoons and handprints appear throughout my series. We will never know what it all means, but they speak to our humanity across 100,000+ generations.
And So It Began