UNRAVELING
Solo exhibition at Outside In Theater in Los Angeles, CA
May 12 to June 9, 2026
I have transformed knitting, a traditional woman’s craft, into a metaphor that speaks about connecting, binding, and unraveling. Knitting becomes a language of healing, undoing trauma, the importance of community and the power of forgiveness.
The Untangling: Rebirth
2017
Mixed Media Painting
36 x 106 inches
$15,000
Here Is the Deepest Secret (after E.E. Cummings)
2018
Mixed Media Painting
14” x 14”
$1,500
“‘This series is about making tangible the knowledge possessed by physicists and mystics,’ Kagan says, ‘that all matter is composed of rapidly moving energy,’ in which nothing is solid and nothing is separate. This language of spiritual science animates the paintings, infusing them with both a luminous ambiguity and a hyper-stylized specificity. Like water under a microscope, the waving tendrils of sea anemones, the pulpy flesh of earthworms, the frantic sparkle of amoebas, the coiling tresses of root systems, all bouncing to the disco beat of molecular heartbeats and at a great distance dissolving once again into something else entirely. Her palette is vividly intense, blue and gold, chartreuse, aubergine, oxblood, peach, goldenrod, lilac, seaweed, amber, ochre, sand, and swimming-pool blue.”
Excerpt from essay by Shana Nys Dambrot, “Sharon Kagan: Microscopic,” Huffington Post, March 17, 2017
Pink Over Blue
2019
Mixed Media Painting
49.5” x 37.75”
$6,000
The difficult realities facing our country led me to create Pink Over Blue and Red, White, & Blue: Frayed Thread, images that address the situation directly. I began experimenting with the use of color as a metaphor for the politics of diversity. My paintings discussed the formal and symbolic qualities of color as they relate to social justice issues. This work is subtle, poetic and evocative, letting the viewer make their own connections with larger socio-political questions and issues.
The Red, White & Blue: Frayed Thread
2019
Mixed Media Painting
43.5” x 38”
$6,000
Jacob's Ladder
2015
Mixed Media Drawing
17.75” x 10”
$1,200
"In the black and white drawings, the enlarged photographs have an atmospheric, soft-focus quality that allows us intimate entry into the fibrous interstices of the knitting. At a distance, the image suggests both an open, sculptural form and an animated organism. When we look carefully, we see that the drawing’s surface is articulated with many finely inked shapes, each of which encapsulates a specific tonality.
The effect is to bring the viewer close to an unfamiliar graphic reality, which is both strongly dimensional and mapped in a way that emphasizes its digital pixels. In this double consciousness we recognize our contemporary life in which images are constantly available yet equally unreliable."
Excerpt from John Mendelsohn essay
Dance Me Very Tenderly and Dance Me Very Long (after Leonard Cohen)
2017
Mixed Media Drawing
14.25” x 12”
$1,000
All of my drawings and paintings began with knitted hemp rope, at first producing knit sculpture. Once I took my first photo of the knitting and tried to enlarge it, I knew that I had more than I originally hoped for. The photos from a 3 megapixel camera would not hold up, and that was the gift. It had broken down the image to an unrecognizable blur. Those early photos were the source of these drawings and paintings. The photographs are the foundation of the ink drawings; without the hours of hand drawing, the image would be unrecognizable. Once the drawing was completed, it was photographed. Using a section of that photo, I enlarged the image and printed it onto canvas; I drew a grid onto the canvas and then began to paint.
Untitled (Drawing #8)
2015
Mixed Media Drawing
12” x 12”
$1,000
Skin Deep, 2019
Mixed Media Drawing
14 x 12.25 inches
$1,000
We're All Just a Link in the Chain
2017
Mixed Media Drawing
12” x 12”
$1,000
The Immateriality of the Material World
2017
Mixed Media Drawing
14” x 12.25”
$1,000
About the Artist
Sharon Kagan is a Los Angeles-based performance artist and sculptor. She received the Vermont Studio Center Residency for May 2026 and the NARS Foundation International Residency for July to September 2026. Kagan received the WORD Artist Grant in 2021.
Bearing Witness, January 31 to April 19, 2026, was a retrospective with a two-day durational performance Leaping, Together at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster (MOAH). Kagan had a four-person show What Remains: Memory, Ritual, Trace at Los Angeles Valley College in March, 2026. In May 2025, Kagan performed ...and then this happened… as part of ENDURANCE, a LACE program, at LA Dance Project.
Kagan’s video performance Freedom from Entanglement was awarded Best US Experimental Short at the Austin International Art Festival and selected for inclusion in national and international film festivals (2024). Video performance The Undoing: Forgiveness was selected for inclusion in national and international film festivals (2022).
From Heaven to Earth
2026
knitted elastic
variable
$7,500