SWITCHBACKS // Sara Detweiler's Unmasquerade

‘Feral Forties’


Sarah Detweiler explores middle age, motherhood, and a big green Grinch suit in ‘Unmasquerade’

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

“I feel like the most consistent thing in my work has always been the idea of concealing parts of the figure or the portrait in order to reveal other things. So that’s kind of what you can see here,” she told me as we walked through the show at Paradigm Gallery + Studio in Old City on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Her solo show, “Unmasquerade,” explores her shifting, kaleidoscopic attention and her multiple identities as an artist, mother, wife, and friend.

The new show is an evolution of Detweiler’s previous “Hidden Mothers” show. In early photographic history, the long exposure times were challenging for children to sit still through. So photographers would drape the mother in cloth and have her hold the child, concealing her in plain sight to get the shot. Detweiler says that she felt “really invisible and isolated as a new mom,” and the series was a way to work it out. “People saw it, and they connected with it,” she said. That, in turn, made her feel seen. (See her painting The Two Childhoods on the cover.) 

In “Unmasquerade,” the figures, most of which are self-portraits, are still somewhat concealed, but Detweiler says these concealments somehow made her feel more herself. //

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