Sarah Lutkenhaus is an interdisciplinary artist using sound, performance, and printed matter as her primary mediums. Her practice explores modes of storytelling across image, sound, and architectural environment. She is currently based in Chicago.
Artist Statement
As an artist, I work across sound, performance, and visual media. My work explores emotional extremes, the instability of language, and the ways meaning is produced through repetition, distortion, and collective memory. Using deep drones, dissonant textures, processed voice, field recordings, and live electronics, I create emotionally charged environments that heighten the tension between control and vulnerability. I am particularly interested in the fleeting nature of live performance and in sound’s capacity to operate before, beneath, or beyond language.
This approach extends into my visual practice, where fragments of image and text are recontextualized through repetition, erasure, and manipulation. Across media, I am interested in how information is organized, how meaning shifts through circulation, and how partial or unstable forms can generate new kinds of attention. My work often develops through improvisation and accumulation, allowing unexpected relationships between sound, language, image, and gesture to emerge.
My influences come from experimental music, performance, poetry, artist publishing, and archival practices. I am also engaged in how artistic knowledge moves through scenes, small venues, archives, publications, and informal networks, often outside traditional institutions. These forms of exchange shape how I think about collaboration, lineage, and the collective production of knowledge.
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As an artist, I work across sound, performance, and visual media. My work explores emotional extremes, the instability of language, and the ways meaning is produced through repetition, distortion, and collective memory. Using deep drones, dissonant textures, processed voice, field recordings, and live electronics, I create emotionally charged environments that heighten the tension between control and vulnerability. I am particularly interested in the fleeting nature of live performance and in sound’s capacity to operate before, beneath, or beyond language.
This approach extends into my visual practice, where fragments of image and text are recontextualized through repetition, erasure, and manipulation. Across media, I am interested in how information is organized, how meaning shifts through circulation, and how partial or unstable forms can generate new kinds of attention. My work often develops through improvisation and accumulation, allowing unexpected relationships between sound, language, image, and gesture to emerge.
My influences come from experimental music, performance, poetry, artist publishing, and archival practices. I am also engaged in how artistic knowledge moves through scenes, small venues, archives, publications, and informal networks, often outside traditional institutions. These forms of exchange shape how I think about collaboration, lineage, and the collective production of knowledge.
Education
Sound MFA School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL
Graphic Design BFA Washington University, St. Louis, MO
New York University Spring Exchange, NY, NY
The Florence Center, Florence, Italy
CV
Sound MFA School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL
Graphic Design BFA Washington University, St. Louis, MO
New York University Spring Exchange, NY, NY
The Florence Center, Florence, Italy
CV