A #ScarboroughSpotlight on Tristan Sauer
Image: Help Me Escape this Portal (2024), by Tristan Sauer
For this month’s Scarborough Spotlight artist feature, we’re thrilled to highlight the work of New Media Artist and Curator Tristan Sauer.
Tristan Sauer is a New Media Artist and Curator critically interested in the relationship between technology and capitalism. His work navigates the intersections between our digital and physical worlds, and what an inside-out look at our relationships with technology can reveal about the human condition. Working in multiple mediums but most closely with physical computing, sculpture, and extended-reality Sauer often explores these topics through an afro-futurist lens imagining and critiquing techno-capitalism's impacts on our present and future realities.
A graduate of the New Media program at Toronto Metropolitan University, Sauer has presented locally at the Plumb, Meridian Art Centre, Gallery 1313, Whippersnapper Gallery, Lansdowne Station, and with The Artist Project, InterAccess and Nuit Blanche. He has curated for Long Winter, Symbicocene Gallery, REEL Asian Film Festival, Xpace Cultural Centre, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, C MAG, The Art Gallery of Guelph and The Confederation Centre of the Arts in PEI.
Video: Your Life Matters (2023), by Tristan Sauer
Your Life Matters is a collection of wearable art tech pieces that both critique the ridiculous lengths protestors have to take to safely interact with police and the intersections between social justice and capitalism. The project takes the form of a collection of wearable tech pieces, designed to help protestors safely navigate police interactions. They are additionally framed as products sold by the fictitious tech company, Sentinel Technology. The framing of the pieces as products ask the audience to question the intersections between social justice and capitalism.
We were grateful to connect with Tristan for an interview about his relationship with his artmaking practice, as well as Scarborough.
Scarborough Arts: What impact do you hope your work has on the community or people who encounter it?
Tristan Sauer: I hope my work makes people think about their relationship with technology. I hope it inspires conversations about what our future may look like and how we can all play a part in shaping it. I hope it makes people realize that power is in community, resilience, and most importantly people not the systems that frame everything.
Scarborough Arts: What does being a creative from Scarborough mean to you?
Tristan Sauer: Scarborough is consistently one of the most underfunded and forgotten areas in Toronto while simultaneously being one of the city's largest pools of creativity, endurance, and resilience. Often too far and too large for anyone not born here or near to becoming familiar with, there's a pride amongst those who do call it home. Being a creative from Scarborough to me means being an ambassador for the neighbourhood, shining a light on the often overlooked talent that exists east of Victoria Park, and bringing forth diverse stories that cannot come from anywhere else in the city.
Black Power for Sale (2021), by Tristan Sauer
Experienced through the medium of a repurposed Gachapon MAchine, synonymous with malls in the early 2000s, Black Power for Sale explores the intersections between capitalism and social justice. Iconic symbols synonymous with black power are sold for $2 a piece in each Gachapon capsule. Visitors are encouraged to purchase and take the work home with them. Once emptied the machine will stay that way as a cautionary tale about capitalism's natural instincts to hollow out important social movements for money.
Through My Cracked Screen (2024), by Tristan Sauer
I still remember reading the reports from the screen of my cracked ipod touch, knowing the name Trayvon Martin was someone different. From that moment on I and countless other black people have held the bodies of those who look like us, victims of violence, in our hands, without laying a finger on their bodies. Our screens become portals to grief, as we process loss on a global scale. The devices we carry in our pockets, meant to connect us to the world, also disconnect us from the tangibility of real care. A loss carried in pockets, and mourned through glass.
Scarborough Arts: Do you have any advice for artists just finding their footing?
Tristan Sauer: The most impactful thing for me early in my career was reaching out to people whose practices and careers I admired. Mentorship is invaluable and people of all levels are extremely willing to lend a word of advice when asked, it's important to remember everyone more established than you was once in your position. I spent a lot of my first year out of school just cold emailing people and setting up meetings, applying to everything I could find and trying to make any half baked idea I came up with work. I think the most impactful thing that kept me going was that the more you do the more will come your way. People will take note of your work and opportunities will follow.
