Catharine Clark Gallery announces the opening of "Imin Yeh: A Salty Rainbow," and "Michael Hall: For Real Life" on view from May 11 through July 3, 2024. Yeh and Hall create extraordinarily crafted works about parenthood, memory, and the deeply felt process of art-making. These are the debut solo gallery exhibitions for both artists following Hall's acclaimed "curbside" exhibition, "Belongings," at the gallery in 2020 and Yeh's solo presentation with EXiT at CODEX 2024. In conjunction with these gallery exhibitions, the gallery presents Lenka Clayton’s sound installation Mothers’ Days Chorus (2020) in the Media Room. The gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday, May 11, 2024, from 1-3 PM (remarks at 2 PM).
Imin Yeh’s "A Salty Rainbow" encompasses thousands of sculptures, rendered as 1:1 copies of objects built out of paper. Yeh writes, "The show is made of small things, a studio practice found in the short and interrupted chunks of time between teaching, administrating, and parenting. But small things can accumulate into big ideas." The first paper crayon, made in 2021, now shares space with over 1000 crayons, all painted a different color. Dreamcabin, a cardboard home begun in global pandemic isolation during a postpartum haze, now houses a collection of almost 100 artworks, mailed from around the world. A Perfect Stack realizes that childhood ambition of building the tallest possible single block tower that does not fall.
Yeh writes, "I have this childhood memory of my father. He was frustrated that I forgot my combination lock over summer break. I remember him sitting down with a stack of dot matrix paper and trying to figure out the combination. It was the perfect way to discipline me. In awe of that determination, I never wanted to forget the combination again. It is a memory my sister shares but my father does not. A (faulty) memory of my dad opening a lock with a combination I forgot over summer break is a drawing of a father mythology, with over 60,000 possible combinations that he could never have fully tried. In a way, The Lines of 100 Index Cards is my response. The only way to make these pickle jars of index card lines is to sit and commit to doing it, through your labor and through your determination. There is no technology that can do it cheaper or faster." Small Sculptures on Screws and Floppy Copies are held up by hundreds of paper screws. Screws are joined by Stanchions and Track Lighting, an homage to the objects in art spaces doing the unseen work of holding up, lighting, and protecting artwork.
The works on view also reimagine the informal/parental archive of the stuffed basement, spare rooms, and home offices of the childhood home. Yeh writes, "There are a lot of snacks in this show, including a paper copy of a sour gummy candy called Airhead Extreme. Upon seeing it in my studio and in our home, my daughter said, ‘Why do you have so many Salty Rainbows?’ The exhibition, by extension, is comprised of small observations with the sensibility of being my father’s daughter and the endless inspiration of being my daughter’s mother."
The gallery presents a special Media Room presentation of Mothers’ Days Chorus (2020) in conversation with Hall and Yeh’s exhibitions. Members of An Artist Residency in Motherhood were invited to simultaneously record the events of the July 15th, 2019, in as much or as little detail as they chose. Recorded over the telephone during the global pandemic, 14 women from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, England, Germany, Lithuania, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Serbia, Spain and across the US read their accounts, one year after first writing them.
The voices are edited together in chronological order, creating a collective chorus of the invisible details of an ordinary Monday, broadcast throughout the gallery. Clayton writes that” An Artist Residency in Motherhood was born out of a feeling of invisibility that I felt as a parent, and that I heard others experienced too. Though parenthood is an ongoing dance of tasks and experiences and near-constant engagement, I'd often find myself at the end of the day thinking I had done nothing all day. ‘Mothers' Days’ is a project – encompassing both a book and an audio work – of what happens when nothing happens.”
