Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze

“Nothing screws with memory like repetition.”

- Stephen King, Joyland

A county fair is, among other things, an exhibition.

For a few days, private things are brought into public and arranged for inspection. Horses. Pumpkins. Quilts. Pies. Paintings. Plumage. Dahlias. Bodies. Families. Appetites. Everyone brings their best something. Then somebody gives it a ribbon.

The history of the American county fair is full of this peculiar enthusiasm for measuring one thing against another. A place where your family sees other families. Where girls grow up beside one another and compare themselves against one another. Somewhere in the wider fairground imagination sits the hot-dog eating contest. For a period in the early twentieth century, even the baby could be entered.

Behind the folksy optimism lies the violent fantasy that human value could be made individual, visible and measurable. It is an interesting place to become a person.

A corn maze is another structure organised around judgement - of choice and confusion. A place built to lose yourself in. Childhood fun and panic.

Throughout Corn Maze, Sara Birns paints bodies, memories and psychic debris into a fairground of collective feeling. A place where hive minds, corn dogs, water, denim, tricksters and third eyes move through the same strange weather.

The county fair emerges here as a social organism. Everyone is watching and everyone is being watched. This is one of Birns's quieter subjects: the strange intimacy of crowds.

The fantasy that we are connected. The fear that we are not separate enough.

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Birns describes the particular feeling of the American county fair as something she could only see after moving outside of it. Her images draw from her memory, but also from an archive of early-2000s fair photography, a visual era of flip phones, frosted lips, and sunburn. Birns takes these already unstable photographs and memories, and disrupts them further. She paints her own features into the faces of strangers. One side of a face appears to hold a different emotion from the other. She knows that a remembered face is rarely preserved with neutrality. The resulting profiles are uncannily convincing because Birns understands how aggressively we read them. Perhaps every self-portrait is also a group portrait.

The resulting works touch on Freud’s idea of the uncanny: the strange disturbance produced when something deeply familiar returns in an altered form. His essay returns repeatedly to doubles, involuntary repetition, the doppelgänger, the evil eye and a disturbing uncertainty that is created when the self becomes unreliable.

This is part of Birns’s humour too.

In Circle of Love, for example, faces turn toward one another in a reverse clockface while the central figure looks outward. The viewer is quietly folded into the circuit, simply by looking. It is the Ferris wheel of the exhibition: faces arranged around an implied rotation, each caught in the orbit of the others. There is something tender and also claustrophobic about the work, as the faces become one communal organism wearing the same shirt. Birns works with traditional structures - diagonals, thirds, old master procedures and carefully rendered fabric. Folds of clothing echo folds of neck and flesh. The paintings please the eye in order to destabilise it.

Built through underpainting, grisaille and layers of glazing, the works carry an old-master seriousness beneath their strange, contemporary theatre. In Frosted Lips and Beard Burn, a single figure parades the canvas, blonde hair blown across her eyes, mouth wet with shimmer. One eye is open; the other sinks into shadow. Pain and sultry performance sit together. Exhaustion and glamour. Every portrait is, somehow, a self-portrait. Even when it is not.

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For years, Sara has kept journals of thumbnails, sketches and affirmations. One of which (‘I will not be possessed by my personality’) is referred to in the title of a work - Possessed by My Personality. It is the first of three darker toned works created while living in Poland. It features the interior of her apartment there, with Sara and her Partner’s profiles bookending the piece. Their faces are spliced, drawn together and apart by a central apparition, as though the shared experience of a relationship has become its own third presence. The space is domestic with elements of a normal room, but it is not stable. Her adoration for painter Richard Dadd is displayed in figures borrowed from his paintings - elves and fairies - sitting among the detritus. A face from Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey also appears in the background. She sees the work as a metaphysical maze - the loops of being isolated.

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The largest painting in the exhibition is also its final work, and its nucleus. Birns gathers many of the motifs of Corn Maze into one crowded field, pockets of normalcy interrupted by pockets of surreality. The central figure appears twice, split in the composition, playing into the logic of a collected consciousness. The figure is both one person and several, caught in the strange drift between individuality and collective feeling. The painting asks one of the exhibition’s central questions: What happens to the individual in a crowd?

Above them, or behind them, or somehow inside them, an eye looks down.

The Eye of the Gathered Glob.

It recalls old religious paintings: a divine gaze, an omniscient force, a strange authority watching from above. But here it is not clear whether this force is creating, guiding, controlling, or simply reflecting the collective back to itself. From it, a spiderweb shoots across the scene, connecting to each of the third eyes of the figures below. The web is delicate, ridiculous, sacred, sticky. Its threads suggest the invisible structures between us: family systems, social codes, memory, intuition, gossip, desire, shame. The things we inherit without seeing. Perhaps there is a darker vocabulary alongside, of entrapment and over-connection. The internet itself was enthusiastically imagined as a web: an image of frictionless human connection. A web connects because a web catches.

Water droplets rest on each thread. Birns has become interested in esoteric ideas concerning water, energy and language: the proposition that words or emotions might somehow imprint themselves onto matter, that bodies might retain vibrations beyond the systems through which contemporary science ordinarily explains them.

Human beings are watery organisms walking around with surprisingly strong convictions about being self-contained.

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At the centre of Corn Maze is the question of what connects us. In Corn Maze, Birns paints the strange intimacy of crowds and the loneliness of being inside them. She paints memory as a field one wanders through, full of wrong turns, bright stalls, hidden forces and returning faces.

A fairground at the edge of the self.

Mollie E. Barnes