Sadie Barnette

Scott Pavilion
Riley CAP Gallery S8

Working across drawing, sculpture, photography, and installation, Sadie Barnette mines both personal narratives and collective histories, exploring how the two intersect and diverge over the course of one’s life. Her exhibition in the CAP Gallery centers on a recording she discovered on a doorbell security camera. In the short black-and-white video, the artist’s father is seen removing helium balloons from the trunk of a car. As he wrangles the inflatables—a gift for the artist’s mother—a single heart-shaped balloon floats away without his notice, prompting a bewildered search of the vehicle. Upon reviewing the footage, Barnette recognized that an easily overlooked episode had many stories to tell—about gestures of affection, about bearing witness to everyday life, and about the transformation of a fleeting moment into the stuff of family lore. 

The doorbell camera footage—presented here as a video titled I DIDN’T MAKE ART ABOUT YOU BECAUSE YOU WERE A BLACK PANTHER I MADE ART ABOUT YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE MY DAD—serves as the foundation for a small group of new works across media. Comprising machined and hand-sanded ash wood, the sculpture Momcalls attention to a figure who is unseen in the video, but whose presence is fundamental to Barnette’s family story. Measuring just over five feet in height, the sculpture expands the artist’s ongoing practice of fabricating words and phrases in three dimensions, endowing them with a literal weight and volume that matches the heft of their meaning. Gentle People’s Bench invites visitors to rest and reflect. Barnette also incorporates text into this work, engraving the wood surface with words that reference family, as well as hearts and other ornamental flourishes. The final component, a drawing titled Dots, is so meticulously rendered it could be mistaken for a mechanically-produced image. Less illustrative than the sculpture and bench, Dotstakes advantage of the opportunity for free association that abstraction provides; in the context of this exhibition, the dots might read as festive, conjuring confetti or cake decorations. In prying open multiple entry points into the tale of the missing balloon, Barnette encourages visitors to acknowledge the profundity of the seemingly unremarkable moments in their own lives.

Pictured: Sadie Barnette (American, b. 1984), I DIDN’T MAKE ART ABOUT YOU BECAUSE YOU WERE A BLACK PANTHER I MADE ART ABOUT YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE MY DAD (still), 2026, single-channel digital video projection, 2 min. 38 sec., © Sadie Barnette, Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco