October 29, 2022 – January 21, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 29 from 2 – 5pm; artists’ talks at 3pm
“But what if the object began to speak?” ––– Luce Irigaray
San Francisco: Catharine Clark Gallery closes its 2022 program with Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis’s One thing after another thing in the Main Galleries and Media Room, and Amy Trachtenberg’s The violet June of autumn in the Viewing Room. Both presentations evoke poetics through the transformation of everyday objects, such as disused clocks and found rocks, or upholstery and shoes. Clayton & Lewis and Trachtenberg create highly crafted and intentional work, but they also hold space for unlikely juxtapositions and chance encounters. Their respective exhibitions, by extension, ask us to meditate on how material interventions can shift, pivot, and inform our perception of the world around us.
Clayton & Lewis’s new collaborative works encompass surfaces such as paper, concrete, and silk. Found materials such as rocks, clocks, nets, and cages are re-considered through varying lenses and processes, including layering, ordering, stitching, printmaking, and environmental exposure. Collectively, their works consider time, repetition, accidental and intentional accumulation, and order and disorder. Filled with absurdity, humor, and attentiveness, their exhibition navigates the audience through an intimate glimpse into the artists’ working practice. Navigating through the gallery space, viewers encounter
One thing:
A single net, sized to catch or keep out a deer.
An Observer’s book of weather from 1973.
A rock from Moon, PA
A cage designed to carry a canary into a coal mine.
A singer counting.
A Rock. A Stone.
And another, and another, and another.
In a suite of new BOXBLUR photogravures, co-published by Mullowney Printing, Clayton & Lewis capture shadows from vintage birdcages that have the ghostly and otherworldly quality of historic photograms. Another BOXBLUR print release, Accumulating Nets, features sixteen prints in which individual plates of nets are layered one on top of another. This sequence begins with a singular grid pattern and builds into a complex and dense “visual noise” that evokes television static or distant galaxies.
A series of oversized Nets to Catch Everything use varying materials to “capture” imagined creatures and objects. A monochrome and almost translucent net is constructed with one of every type of net sold by the last remaining British net maker. Assembled into diamond forms, the composite net is constructed with netting to catch bantams, chickens, cricket balls, doves, ducks, footballs, fruit pests, geese, golf balls, partridge poults, peacocks, pheasants, pigeons, rugby balls, seagulls, sparrows, and starlings.
In the Media Room, the gallery features the West Coast debut of Clayton & Lewis’s Five Hundred Twenty-Four (2022), originally commissioned for the FRONT Triennial. Clayton & Lewis’s video work features singers from twenty-one choirs who are all counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one,” then two people sing “two,” and so forth, to 524. Each choir was filmed separately, and the audio was woven together while the video features each choir individually. This work marks the formation and dissipation of a new group made up of pre-existing groups who usually operate separately behind closed doors in different places. Although the singers were never in the same space, here they digitally become one collective musical body. While the piece is sung with a collective voice, every individual is uniquely tasked to begin and end counting at their specific number. The score is a roll call, an audit, a measurement performed by the measured.
In the Viewing Room, the gallery presents its debut solo presentation with Amy Trachtenberg, The violet June of autumn. Trachtenberg writes that “textiles console us. They adorn, protect, and swaddle us. These meditative constructions often incorporate or reference textiles, materials that envelop us from birth to death. The groundwork for this body of work comes from collecting, examining, shaping, and dismantling shoes, underwear, upholstery, zippers, and printed matter. Hard elements such as wood, metal and Plexiglas also weave their way into my constructions.”
Trachtenberg notes that “I’m drawn to the familiar and flawed, characteristics that speak to shared human histories. My work begins with a response/attraction to a thing or circumstance that profoundly touches or disturbs me. In varied processes of painting, printmaking, sculpture, collage and installation, my approach is one of accretion and subtraction, tethered to traditional art and craft techniques. Improvisation and site specificity are factors in determining how to situate a work.” In conjunction with this presentation, Catharine Clark Gallery announces its representation of Amy Trachtenberg.
In conversation with both exhibitions, the gallery announces special BOXBLUR performances on Sunday, October 30 and Saturday, November 19. On October 30 (7:30pm) the gallery collaborates with Dance Film SF to present Experimental Shorts for the 2022 San Francisco Dance Film Festival. The program features plum tree gorilla ladder (2022) by Maya Gurantz, Structure: Making Bolero (2020)by Seoljin Kim and Iwa, and The Collective Attention (2022)by John Sanborn. The evening concludes with a live performance by Collective Attention (Carolina Czechowska and Jamielyn Duggan) accompanied by Edward Nelson. Tickets ($45 – 75) are available via Eventbrite at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/boxblur-at-catharine-clark-galleryexperimental-shorts-2022-sfdff-tickets-405090525667?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
On Saturday, November 19, please save the date for an evening of performances, readings, and projections curated by Amy Trachtenberg and co-presented with Small Press Traffic.
Join us for an opening celebration on Saturday, October 29 from 2 – 5pm; artists’ talks with Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis and Amy Trachtenberg begin at 3pm.
