Sarah Smalik (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in installation, video, sculpture and performance.
Their experimental approach finds the threads between ancient stories, the supernatural, elemental, ironic and iconic. Since childhood, Smalik has been innately obsessed with the apocalyptic anxieties attached to the end of an era. A descendant of South Asian and Acadian lineages— as well as a trained theatre clown— the work often dissects their own ancestral knots associated with hidden histories of violence. This probing proposes the idea that the disruptive ‘glitch’ (i.e. trickster) in the narrative is both a prompt — and passageway — to evolve.
Smalik earned a BFA in Sculpture with distinction from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2010, and an MFA in New Genres from the University of California Los Angeles in 2017.