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(GARDENING, NOT ARCHITECTURE)

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Sarah Saturday's solo project, Gardening, Not Architecture (G, NA), began as a series of demos recorded on cassette tape during the freezing Wisconsin winter of 2003. Sarah never expected these recordings would lead her to where she is today. After the demise of her punk band in 2005, Sarah revisited her demos and released a four-song EP under the name Gardening, Not Architecture, or G,NA. The songs quickly gained popularity online, leading to pressure from fans for Sarah to perform live. In 2008, she played her first two G,NA shows in Los Angeles, and by 2009, she was on her first solo tour, performing with a bass guitar, backing tracks, and a homemade LED light wall. That same year, she recorded her first full-length album, First LP. 


Between 2009 and 2012, Sarah played over 200 shows as G,NA, touring the United States and Canada multiple times, including two months on a side stage of the 2010 Warped Tour. In 2011, she released her second album, Saboteur, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign. After relocating to Nashville in 2012, Sarah began shifting her focus from touring to building relationships within Nashville's budding and diverse art community, as well as venturing into the world of film. In 2015, she released her third album, Fossils, as both an album and feature-length film, to critical acclaim. Sarah composed her first film score for the indie feature film, Superpowerless in 2016, and in 2017, she focused on scoring music for film and TV, contributing music to shows on the Discovery and History channels.


In 2020, Sarah hosted her first-ever residency in partnership with Mindful Nashville, composed the score for a new short film, and was invited to perform as part of a streaming event at Oz Arts Nashville. In 2021, Sarah began recording her fourth studio album, produced by her brother, John Paul Roney of Boom Forest. Her only live show in 2021 was a reimagined version of her "Absence of Me" performance piece for the 2021 Kindling Arts Festival.


Sarah started 2022 with a two-night performance in the Portals group show at Oz Arts Nashville, before beginning production on her new full-scale theatrical performance piece, Voyage. This masterpiece is built around nine short films directed by her long-time collaborator and friend Dycee Wildman, and co-written by Sarah and Dycee. Sarah was invited as one of four artists to share work-in-progress excerpts from Voyage in the Brave New Works Lab, a three-night group show at Oz Arts Nashville in May 2022. The performance and new music received rave reviews, and Sarah began releasing singles from the forthcoming album in late 2022.
In January 2023, Sarah was invited to be the artist in residence for one month at Coop Gallery in Nashville. During this time, she showed behind-the-scenes photos, props, and costumes from the making of Voyage. She even created several pieces of original mixed-media artwork using images and lyrics from the show. She also performed the nearly-finished full performance piece eleven times for private audiences and was met with such overwhelming responses that Sarah decided to take this special preview version of the nearly-finished show on the road in April 2023. 


In June of 2023, Sarah was awarded the Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for fiscal year 2024. Sarah is currently preparing to release her final single, “Like You”, from the new album ahead of the August 2023 premiere of Voyage: A Live Visual Album at Darkhorse Theatre in Nashville, TN. 

Like You
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Voyage is the latest multimedia project from Nashville-based music and performance artist Sarah Saturday (also known as Gardening, Not Architecture), featuring a mix of vibrant original songs (produced by Boom Forest) performed live to backing tracks, innovative short films (directed by Sarah’s long-time collaborator, filmmaker Dycee Wildman), dance (choreographed by Joi Ware), audio sampling, and spoken word. This “live visual album” is an invitation to audiences to tap into something truly vulnerable within themselves, creating a safe space for whatever feelings may arise. The stage play explores the shifting relationship we have with our complex and layered identities – those parts of ourselves both positive and negative that are always trying to protect us, sometimes to our detriment. Only by confronting and befriending these innermost parts of ourselves can we find peace within, and only from this ground of peace within can we truly begin the work of building a more peaceful world around us.

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