San Francisco: Catharine Clark Gallery opens its Summer 2024 exhibitions program with three exhibitions: Listening Chamber, a solo exhibition by Amy Trachtenberg, in the North Gallery; The Sky You Were Born Under: Sharing Stories Through Abstraction, a group exhibition featuring work by Ashwini Bhat, Chelsea Bighorn, Dorothy Napangardi, Esteban Ramon Perez, Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Carlos Villa, and Marie Watt, in the South Gallery; and The Garden of Maladies, an animation by Zeina Barakeh, in the Media Room. All three exhibitions are on view July 13 – September 14, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, July 13 from 2-4pm. The artists’ remarks will be at 3pm.
Listening Chamber: Amy Trachtenberg combines found or reclaimed objects and materials with paint, ink, and printmaking techniques. She is drawn to the tensions and unexpected harmonies that emerge when seemingly unlike materials are layered upon one another. Trachtenberg cites interdisciplinary artist and Black Mountain College co-founder Anni Albers (1899 – 1994) as an inspiration for the exhibition’s title and her approach to materials, particularly Albers’s maxim that artists are most successful when they “listen” to their materials and allow themselves to be intuitively guided by them. In the influential 1982 essay “Material as Metaphor,” Albers posited: “How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? Accidentally. Something speaks to us—a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. I learned to listen to [my materials] and to speak their language. I learned the process of handling them.”
In Listening Chamber, Trachtenberg works expansively with disparate materials: she dissects and wraps objects; stitches bras into nets; photocopies, tears, and collages newspapers; casts found branches in bronze; and creates relief prints from garments pressed into canvas with an etching press. Some works in the exhibit are made by folding raw linen canvas into peaks and crests. Covered with aluminum-based paint, they have a metallic luster that simultaneously evokes bodies of water and architectural surfaces. Trachtenberg writes that “in these paintings, I wanted to experiment with how to draw with folds instead of brushes. By manipulating my canvases and giving them dimensionality and structure, I release them from a frame and evoke a dialogue with my sculptural works.” Similarly, Trachtenberg describes her works created in part by etching press as “an extension of my collage practice, which comes out of my impulse to collect evidence from the world around us. In the relief prints, I am interested in how the resulting images resemble negatives and x-rays in that they both reveal and obscure the original objects that are run through the press onto the canvas. I add layers of pastel and colored pencil to further draw out the light and shadows so these ‘traces’ have an almost otherworldly aura. This aura is meant to evoke how objects are never simply dormant.” The bending, pressing, collaging, and layering transform the source materials forming new meaning, though the results are often abstract. For example, in a series of collage-based works that draw on several decades of reportage on wars and displacement, Trachtenberg creates compositions through photocopies of newspapers, altering the images and text by folding and overlaying them so that the original content becomes increasingly distorted and abstract. Though the images are not immediately legible, closer inspection reveals key details: a line of text from the New York Times, or the shroud of an older woman seated on the ground. Trachtenberg writes that “the images in these collages draw upon patterned textiles, landscapes, images of hands and eyes, and depictions of vulnerable people. The collages reflect on feelings of grief, both globally and closer to home.” These works evoke the feeling of being constantly unsettled and overwhelmed by war and global conflict. Trachtenberg’s work asks us to pause and consider/listen: to spend careful time with the human stories that are often lost in the noise, and to find space to connect.
