The Valley is pleased to present Aziza Was Bitten by a Rabid Dog and She Survived, an exhibition of new works by Sarah Esme Harrison. This exhibition is her third with the gallery, and first at our Santa Fe location. The works in this exhibition are explorations of the concept of faith, the power of personal objects, and the idea that a mysterious world is concealed within the one we know.

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Last April, I was walking down the street when a cat came up to me and rubbed his head on my leg. I reached down to pet him and then he bit my hand and ran away, leaving two bloody tooth marks near my index finger. When I told my mom what happened, she said,

 “Aziza was bitten by a rabid dog and she survived.” 

Aziza, a cousin somehow, who moved to the United States years before I was born, was already in her eighties when I was five and met her for the first and last time. I imagined a scene that was just as apocryphal as the anecdote that inspired it. Eight-year-old Aziza, her swollen leg propped up on an ottoman and tied off with a pink ribbon above the knee, contemplates her condition with the otherworldly patience of a child. Adults whiz around her like planets. Her father and her uncles have found a way to profit off the opium wars and they are making deals. Her mother and her aunts are folding and unfolding tablecloths and using their cigarette holders to jab at the rotary phone so they can make long-distance phone calls. Beyond the house there is a neighborhood and beyond the neighborhood there is a wall and beyond the wall is the rest of the city and beyond the city is the rest of the world, and the world is an eye, and Aziza, deep in meditation and performing a miracle, is the iris. 

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I have spent many hours of my life painting, an activity in which I use my hands to express the movement of my eyes. After a long day, sometimes I lie down and imagine submerging my hands under water, touching something I can't see, like I’m standing in front of a full sink, doing dishes, and finding a plate.  In this instance, the eye follows the hand. Reversing the chain of command has a tonic quality, like sleeping. Using the hand to see implies darkness, darkness implies the night, and the night implies dreaming. 

I began making collages out of old playing cards. I covered them with painted tissue paper to give them color. I cut out hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, and used them to make marks, like I was drawing. Grids became landscapes, cities, and rooms, and then everything else transformed. Now the back of the University of New Mexico Press book is the front of a church. The face cards are kings and queens, of course. The ripped paper is a tree trunk. The hearts are apples. The diamonds are stars. The tapestry is a garden. The gouache painting is a lake. The dead moth is an angel. 

Although the cards are worthless, they suggest wealth, and touched by unknown hands, they become like a worn-down statue of a saint, embedded with ideas about fate, hope, and sudden reversals of fortune. Chance, veiled information, faith, and in particular, the idea that a hidden world is concealed or intermingled with the one we know are concepts I explore when I paint, and I saw those ideas show up again when I let myself simply pick things up and glue them together.