Sarina Villareal

I am a Utah-based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting and installation. My work explores memory, environmental transformation, and systems of interference — both psychological and physical — through layered abstraction, fragmented botanical forms, and structural disruption.

Much of my practice began through an interest in recollection and instability: studying subjects intensely and later reconstructing them from memory rather than direct visual reference. Over time, those investigations expanded into broader questions surrounding landscape, development, ecological anxiety, and the fragile systems humans create to preserve meaning, place, and identity.

I am particularly interested in the tension between organic forms and imposed structures — the ways landscapes become interrupted, divided, archived, or transformed through human intervention. Black structural marks, fractured grids, and disrupted floral elements recur throughout my work as visual evidence of obstruction, interference, and altered perception.

Recent exhibitions, including Anthropocene, continue this investigation through paintings and installations that examine environmental change and the instability of preservation itself.

I received a BFA in...

BFA University of Houston, 2008

MS in Museum Studies at Harvard Extension School, 2026

Select Exhibitions:

2026 — Anthropocene (Curated Group Exhibition), Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, UT

2017 — Window Installation, The Gateway, Salt Lake City, UT

2016 — Decay, Pop-Up Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT

2015 — Efflorescence Interference, Gallery at the Main, Salt Lake City, UT

2013 — Decay Theory (Solo Exhibition), Utah Arts Festival Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT

2013 — Traces (Solo Exhibition), Sugarhouse Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT

2012 — Means of Egress (Solo Exhibition), Sugarhouse Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT

2012 — Portraits, Linus Galleries, Pasadena, CA