15 ¼ x 12 ¼ inches framed
Lenka Clayton | Won, Too, Free, For
Media Room: Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis| One Rock & One Stone
April 6 – May 11, 2019
Opening reception: Saturday, April 6, 2019 from 3 – 5pm
Artist talk and conversation at 4pm with Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
San Francisco, CA: Catharine Clark Gallery opens its Spring 2019 program with Won, Too, Free, For, the gallery’s debut solo exhibition with Lenka Clayton. Following Clayton’s acclaimed presentation at UNTITLED, Art San Francisco in January 2019, the gallery presents an immersive exhibition of sculptures, typewriter drawings, photographs, and videos that engage with everyday materials and situations, extending the familiar into realms of the poetic, the absurd, and the profound. Clayton’s “Typewriter Drawings” – illustrated works on paper entirely rendered with a portable 1957 Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter – line the gallery’s walls in thematic groupings such as “Art World Drawings,” “Important Documents,” and “Pots.” Though playful and often humorous, Clayton’s drawings also reflect an extraordinary facility with rendering, driven by a restless and incisive inquisitiveness about how we collectively document and catalogue the world around us.
Clayton notes that “for seven years, the typewriter has been central to my process and ideas, with many approaches and curiosities first appearing as drawings.” For her, the typewriter drawings are both documents of her intellectual and formal enquiries, and blueprints for sculptural works: “As ideas often come off the page, they lead to other works – and sometimes return to their original form – as they oscillate between two and three dimensions.” A drawing that depicts a vanished magician’s assistant, for example, inspires a changing installation of “vanishing” wands that magically transform from oversized (four feet wide) to miniscule (1/2” wide); while an Anni Albers-designed geometric pattern, first rendered on a typewriter, is “printed” with the same typewriter on a button-up oxford shirt, an act of translation that considers “the relationship between the hand-made and the machine-made by misusing a machine designed to accomplish one kind of task, to achieve another for which it is quite unsuited.”
The artist’s interest in archives and artistic process are further realized in Letters from Sculptors (2019), a new series of photographs debuting in Won, Too, Free, For. Shot in museum archives, the photographs depict letters written and sent to museums by famous sculptors. Clayton’s photographs emphasize the particular form and composition of the folded documents with little regard for the typed messages themselves. Clayton remarks that she was fascinated in how these “forms were made by sculptors whose hands folded the paper, rendering each into a unique object.” Encountering these letters in the archive, for her, was akin to encountering “overlooked, accidental sculptures,” unnoticed by the passive observer. By photographing these letters, Clayton both reveals these unseen works, while upending our concepts of the ephemeral and the canonical.
Collaboration is also central to Clayton’s practice, and her works frequently expand concepts of authorship and translation. Perfect Siblings (2018) features two hand-made clocks by Otto and Early Clayton, the artist’s children; with amorphous clock faces and numbers incongruously drawn, the clocks make a seemingly mismatched pair. By referencing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ matching clocks in Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991) – in which two synchronized clocks eventually fall out of time with one another – Perfect Siblings invites viewers to consider the impossibility of finding a perfect match with another person, while poetically asking us to appreciate our most basic relationships, and the importance of living side-by-side with each other. Similarly, One Rock & One Stone (2018), a collaborative video by Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, documents “an evolving call and response made over the course of a year,” in which the artists – now partners – depict a hundred recorded actions using one rock and one stone at their respective studios in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Though initially humorous and even absurd, the interventions become increasingly dramatic, suspenseful, and even tender – unfolding much like a relationship.
Won, Too, Free, For opens with a reception on Saturday, April 6 from 3 – 5pm, with an artist talk and conversation at 4pm with Clayton and Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin.
