Age: 25 • Lives and creates: Cleveland • Learned: BA in studio art from Fairmont State University; MFA from Kent State University
Story by Amanda Koehn
Growing up with the natural wonders of Appalachia in her backyard, Sarah Esposito has long been drawn to the complex, ever-changing moments landscapes offer.
Through her painting and collage artwork, she depicts those moments she witnesses in nature that may only occur at a singular time and spot on Earth.
“While my work might change with different mediums or doing different things throughout my life, I do think that I will always have this tie to how I experience the landscape as a person who’s from Appalachia,” she tells Canvas during an interview in her art studio in an apartment she shares with her husband in Cleveland’s Shaker Square neighborhood.
Esposito grew up in Fairmont, W.Va., visiting nearby natural sites like the Blue Ridge Mountains and Summersville Lake. She remains nostalgic for her many experiences exploring different natural shapes and patterns.
“The landscape is something that is so perfect,” she says. “It’s just one of the most ever-changing things that I’ve ever experienced throughout my life.”
While her parents, a salesman and an eye doctor, are not artists themselves, they were always supportive of her going into the arts, she says. Her father helped put together her studio.
Always being an “art kid,” she says she initially studied art education at Fairmont State University. But she found herself trying to get out of art education events to spend more time in the studio, eventually deciding to switch to studio art. She focused heavily on en plein air, landscape-inspired paintings, and hiked at state parks with her roommate in her free time.
Going straight from undergrad to Kent State University to pursue her Master of Fine Arts in painting, Esposito learned from mentors like Gianna Commito and Shawn Powell, both artists and professors.
During graduate school, Esposito transitioned her practice to cutting her canvas into structural shapes, creating “nuanced moments of landscape,” she says. She’ll stretch linen over some of her works, and use paint to build on the experience.
Working with wood, linen, canvas, acrylic paint and additional materials, Esposito’s pieces draw you into their irregular natural shapes and saturated hues. With tiny ridges, vivid stain painted colors and pieces that pop out at you, looking at the pieces in her studio, you want to see more and stare deeper – and also slow down, go outside and experience some of those unique landscape moments for yourself – all at the same time.
Intrigued by processes like rocks collecting at the base of a river, negative space carved out by erosion, melting ice and all kinds of shifting natural forces, “I kind of just want to capture those moments through formal language of color and shape,” she says. “I really think about positive and negative spaces as something that’s super prominent, too.”
“I think the things that I’m most interested in are capturing that really quick moment – that even though my work is not ephemeral, I know that the world and the Earth is ephemeral,” she adds. “So it’s kind of like that ephemeral feeling of, how can I capture these quick moments in landscape and like harvest them and kind of recreate those?”
Still drawn to education, Esposito began teaching at Kent State during graduate school and she says she prefers doing so at the collegiate level. She graduated in 2022, and currently teaches Kent’s Foundations art classes. The experience has been very rewarding, she says. She also worked for the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art as an art handler.
Esposito says she’s working on balancing her time between art making, teaching and tasks like building her website, applying to grants and residencies, and so forth.
“I have to remind myself that real life isn’t grad school when it comes to art,” she says, adding that seeing how her peers and mentors have handled balancing everything has helped her. “There is time for rest, and I have to allow myself that, but also there is time for work and there’s time for research.”
In February, Esposito celebrated her first solo show, “Into the Syncline,” which opened at KINK Contemporary in Cleveland’s Waterloo Arts District. She also was in “Shapes of Abstraction” at Context Fine Art at the 78th Street Studios on Cleveland’s west side in September, and an exhibit with Alex Vlasov titled “Two Neighbors” at The Ohio State University’s Urban Art Space in Columbus in August. She calls these experiences “some really incredible opportunities to get my work seen.”
Up next, Esposito says she aims to hone in on her practice and capitalize on her successes in the past year by applying to residencies and artistic grants. She also recently sold a piece to Summa Health Gallery.
Her creations also reflect her personal experiences in various times and spaces. In recent years, her work has reflected landscapes in Utah – where she visited for a couple weeks during graduate school and snapped tons of photos she’s still working from – and here in Ohio.
“I think about a lot how some trees don’t even get to be seen by people, or some rock formations or creeks are always constantly flowing and changing, and we’re not even there to experience that,” she says. “So I think like going and finding those moments and nailing those down, and either sketching them or taking photos, and illuminating those and bringing those to life in each one of my pieces, (it’s) something that I feel like I can do for the rest of my life, which is so insane.”
See more at @sarahresposito
“Sarah has an astute ability to translate her interactions with the natural world – stone formations, horizons, mountain peaks and so on – into very nuanced irregular shaped paintings. Her sensitivity to color, composition, shape and materiality provides us with a tactile and sensory connection to her subject matter. She makes landscape paintings that do not merely replicate a singular image of a traditional landscape, but instead simulates a three-dimensional replication of the sensations that landscapes afford us.”
Shawn Powell, associate professor of painting, Kent State University
