Sarah Malakoff

Find out more about Sarah's new book just published by Charta here

Sarah Malakoff was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1972. Her large-scale color photographs are examinations of the home and its psychologically charged, uncanny spaces and objects. Her work has been widely exhibited in both solo and group shows nationally and are included in several public and private collections. Untitled Interiors, a 16 page Artist’s Project, was published in Esopus Magazine in 2007. She has been awarded Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2001 and 2011 and a Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2011. She is Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and resides in Boston, Massachusetts with her husband and four cats. She is represented by Miller Yezerski Gallery and Hagedorn Foundation Gallery

View more of Sarah's work here

Project Statement

We curate our most intimate spaces to create an environment capable of eliciting responses ranging from relaxation, sophistication, to adventurousness. Our tastes, personalities, quirks and culture are expressed through our décor choices – sometimes intentionally, but often without realizing bits of our most authentic selves have seeped to the surface. My photographs are a collection of private spaces that ask the viewer to imagine the people who inhabit them. We see both the unique ways we live behind closed doors, as well as the universal impulse to control our environment. In my images, the home is seen as both a refuge from and at times a re-creation of the outside world. For example, doors and windows can both frame exterior views and serve to keep the elements at bay. Landscape, weather, and wildlife lurk outside the walls even as they are brought safely inside in the form of pattern, simulation, and domesticated animals. Tensions and humor appear between absence and presence, genuine and artificial, the domestic and the natural worlds.