Overview
Sarah Beadle is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. In her art practice, she proposes and develops one body of work at a time, untied to medium or developmental continuity. Her interdisciplinary practice engages the structural politics of labor alongside the conceptual and material possibilities of photographic form. Rooted in a deep familiarity with systems of service, class, and institutional critique, her early work focused on hospitality as both a social performance and a mode of embodied labor. Over time, her practice has expanded toward a research-based engagement with photographic archives, image systems, installation, and sculptural strategies. Her current work examines the conditions under which visibility, authority, and historical memory are produced, circulated, and contested.
Current Work
Sarah Beadle’s current practice centers on photography, archival material, and installation as vehicles for critical inquiry into systems of classification, visibility, and historical legibility. Her work explores the photograph not merely as a representational image, but as a regulatory form—an administrative artifact that shapes what is recorded, remembered, or excluded from public memory.
Her recent projects incorporate strategies of redaction, layering, sculptural collage, and re-captioning to disrupt the aesthetics of bureaucratic neutrality. Through the use of saturated color, text, transparent materials, and architectural presentation, Beadle foregrounds the image as a site of instability—deeply embedded within broader systems of policy, power, and cultural production.
Beadle frequently works with extant material—public archives, personal documents, vernacular photographs, and civic ephemera—deploying recontextualization as a method for exposing the visual and textual codes that structure institutional knowledge. Her research addresses the codification of labor, the optics of state authority, and the domestication of visual culture within the archive.
Guided by a sustained engagement with expanded photographic practice, Beadle’s work resists resolution in favor of accumulation, contradiction, and partiality. Her compositions often hover at the threshold of legibility, inviting viewers to consider what lies between visibility and erasure, record and residue, system and self.
Early Work
Sarah Beadle’s early work is grounded in a lived engagement with labor and class, particularly as shaped by her years working within the restaurant industry while pursuing access to higher education. This embodied knowledge informed an initial investigation into the visual and institutional frameworks through which labor is organized, aestheticized, and archived.
In projects such as Selections from the LOC: Accidents, Beadle appropriated and reclassified historical photographs from the Library of Congress—specifically Lewis Hine’s documentation of child labor—through acts of cropping, retitling, and juxtaposition. These interventions destabilized archival authority, highlighting the contingency of historical meaning and the editorial force embedded within cataloging practices.
This inquiry developed into a materially grounded photographic practice that used the 4x5 view camera to document performative enactments of invisible labor. In works like Perpetual Acts of Maintenance (2012), Beadle restaged the repetitive, often overlooked gestures of restaurant service work to draw attention to the aesthetics and erasures of institutional hospitality.
Beadle also undertook sustained photographic explorations of abandoned sites in the California desert, including abandoned homes in Wonder Valley and the decommissioned George Air Force Base. These projects focused on interiors as critical spaces where domestic and gendered labor leave visible and affective traces. Her images document the residual architectures of maintenance—floors, countertops, curtains, wallpaper—capturing how interior design becomes a form of class expression, rooted in aesthetic codes shaped by ideology. Through careful attention to the textures of decay, reuse, and decorative choice, these photographs examine taste as a historically and politically contingent language. They ask what remains of the home when labor disappears, and how cultural memory lingers in dust and design.
In parallel, Beadle co-founded Notch, an ensemble art collective that mobilizes cooking, dining, and hospitality as mediums for social critique and participatory performance. Through historically researched and site-responsive events, Notch reimagines shared meals as platforms for discursive engagement and ethical inquiry. By drawing from service industry experience and menu/recipe archives the collective’s work examines the entanglements of labor, class, and taste in the politics of everyday consumption. Notch directly confronts the legacy of hierarchical kitchen systems—particularly the Escoffier brigade—as a lens through which to reconsider reciprocity, the politics of service, and the commodification of choice. As context for debate, events take place in liminal spaces of social exchange where reciprocity (or lack of it) is more pronounced: thresholds, back hallways, parking lots, kitchens, garages, and bus stops.
Bio
Beadle’s teaching experience ranges from high school darkroom and digital photography to college and MFA arts foundations, new genres, modern and contemporary art history, and photography. Institutions include Marlborough School, Oakwood School, University of California, Irvine, Syracuse University, Willamette University, and Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is driven to discover the unique way each of her students learns and thrives creatively and academically, utilizing a variety of experiential teaching methodologies.
She has produced events and performed nationally at UAG at CSULB, Long Beach; LAXART, Los Angeles; Rochester Art Center, Rochester; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Materials & Applications, Los Angeles; UAG at University of California, Irvine; University of California, Los Angeles; Carter and Citizen Gallery, Los Angeles; Queen’s Nails Projects, San Francisco; 18 Reasons, San Francisco; NTBA Gallery, Los Angeles. She has exhibited at LAXART, Los Angeles; UAG Gallery, University of California, Irvine; Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles; and Denizen Design Gallery, Los Angeles.
CV on request
contact: sarah@sarahbeadle.com