Tender: Intimacy in the Digital Age, is an immersive site-specific installation featuring new artwork by Sarah Allen Eagen, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Beacon, New York. Tender: Intimacy in the Digital Age explores explores the sensual, vulnerable, and alienating aspects of the digitization of society. This exhibition explores interpersonal relationships in the twenty-first century, where intimacy is often replaced with immediacy. “Tender” is a play on “Tinder,” the name of the ubiquitous dating app whose tag-line is “Tinder is how people meet. It's like real life, but better.” The Internet has an immediate and powerful impact on human relationships, and this exhibition is Inspired by the ways in which the human experience is mediated by digital skins. Eagen’s work highlights the ways in which people communicate and construct their identity in an online world and demonstrates how the desire for connection can be found in the ways in which people use technology to connect with one and another.
The virtual world provides a seemingly quick fix in the search for meaningful bonds. When one feels alone, they can send a text, or search for a new connection, and receive immediate feedback. These transient cyber connections can be satisfying in the short term, but are a different experience than as face-to-face, voice-to-ear, skin-to-skin communication. There is a power and fragility underlying this desire for connection and hidden moments of contact as this tenderness is mediated by technology.
"I wish this scar to have been given with all of the love that never occurred between us...", photograph on silk, 34" x 28"
Death Becomes Her, photograph on silk, 28"x34"
Death Becomes Her, photograph on silk, 28"x34"
Countries of the body, photograph on silk, 28"x34"
Eyelashes, photograph on silk, 28"x34"
Thumbprint, photograph on silk, 28"x34"
Blink (crease of an eyelid), photograph on silk, 28"x34"