Stop 203 - Oasis

Oasis, 1984
Mixed media installation
Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

Set in a sandy landscape and featuring over two dozen glass spheres of various colors and sizes, Oasis features a pink children’s wicker chair, its seat covered in rosebuds and its armrests and back affixed with twenty-one small candles. With the candles and flowers symbolizing youth and coming of age, Oasis can be seen as both a refuge and the threshold to adult life. Of the work, Saar says: “Each part of a person’s life is an oasis, like childhood and old age and death and the path in between.”

Saar’s installations are based on the concept of display and power. Some elements are decorative in order to, in Saar’s words, “seduce viewers”— like the colorful glass spheres glistening in the sand—setting the stage for elements of power inherent to the objects. “I interpreted ‘power’ as intuition, as mystery, as ancestral memory, as personal experiences, dreams, feelings, and energy,” says Saar.