North Gallery + North Video Screening Room

On view October 11, 2025 - January 3, 2026

Catharine Clark Gallery will close its 2025 program with three solo exhibitions: Lenka Clayton's The Past (North Gallery), Katherine Vetne's Between Worlds (South Gallery), and Nanci Amaka's Cleanse / Floors (Media Room). Collectively, the exhibitions reflect on women's labor, the reimagining of domestic spaces, and memory as a creative force. All three will be on view from October 11, 2025, to January 3, 2026.

Lenka Clayton's exhibition The Past continues her interest in depicting the everyday through drawing. The images are made with a 1957 Smith Corona typewriter. Clayton's acclaimed work involves daily situations, extending the familiar into the poetic and the absurd. Her newest series of "Typewriter Drawings" playfully responds to commonly shared experiences and grapples with issues of acceptance and control.

Clayton writes: "Since 2012, when I first accidentally made a typewriter drawing while in Paris, I have developed a deep, subconscious relationship with the process of thinking through typing. This boils down to something like: 'start making one drawing and the title for the next one will come.' While living life, I try to pay attention to things: the fly that is always there, the point when newly applied paint overtakes the old paint, the everyday magic of magnetism… Then I remember and memorialize these things by depicting them as drawings rendered with a clunky old Smith-Corona-which, after the 13 years of misuse and battery I have subjected it to, as well as decades of writing invoices or obituaries or whatever it was doing before-can now barely write a legible M, Z, or T, and its '_' key is indented by tiny arcs from millions of fingernail strikes."

Some of the drawings depict minor mishaps, such as a fly that inadvertently appears on a photocopier or the residue on a shelf from an overwatered plant. Others are humorous, like a rendering of sheet music for Leonard Cohen's song "Bird on a Wire," with birds as proxies for the notes. In this body of work Clayton also introduces red as a formal and conceptual element. The color is derived from the red typewriter ribbon that was a mainstay of some typewriters, particularly those used for accounting and bookkeeping to highlight negative numbers and credits. Clayton uses it in a work titled The Non-Miraculous Part, which depicts a red plastic fortune-telling fish. The fortune teller, miracle fish is made of sodium polyacrylate; if you place it in your hand, it will bend and wiggle in response to your hand's moisture. Its movements can reportedly be deciphered to predict the future. But these movements-though they may seem miraculous-are a result of the fish's chemical composition, not magic.

To view a short video of Lenka Clayton discussing her "Typewriter Drawing" series, please click the following link: https://vimeo.com/130099657

Clayton has also created new sculptures for the exhibition, including a dazzling Typewriter Quilt composed of 120 panels, each with a typewritten pattern and painstakingly hand-stitched. She also created several hankies that serve as "paper" for a series of typewriter-rendered marks-a strong nod to Anni Albers' practice of typographical renderings on textiles.

A collaborative video titled The Wind, created with her collaborator and husband Phillip Andrew Lewis, will be presented in the gallery's north video screening area. The Wind is a feature-length film meticulously constructed from over 1,000 clips featuring wind taken from hundreds of other movies-from rom-coms to Westerns, spy dramas, and horror movies. These films were all commercially produced and come from countries all around the world, creating a sense of a shared force that we can observe as it travels around the globe.

Wind footage in films is usually a secondary presence, used to foreshadow imminent, often ominous, change and provide an emotional or temporal cut. These overlooked scenes are amassed in The Wind in increasing intensity according to the Beaufort Wind Scale, from plants that almost imperceptibly quiver to a tornado that tears a building from its foundations.

Each clip of wind has its original sound. Sometimes this is the wind itself, but more often it carries fragments of tone, dialogue, music, or the edge of dramatic action from its previous context. We look at a cherry orchard through falling blossoms and hear a blood-curdling scream. We see an uninhabited farmhouse and hear a car door slam behind us. This seemingly random audio, a form of concrete poetry, is connected by the repeated visual of the wind, which increases in force as the film develops. A large-scale projection of The Wind will be the featured event of the gallery's holiday party on Saturday, December 13.

Catharine Clark Gallery is also pleased to announce that Clayton will be spotlighted in Season 12 of Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, the acclaimed television series on PBS, alongside other notable artists: Sophie Calle, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Dyani White Hawk, and Ragnar Kjartansson. Stay tuned for details about an upcoming screening at the gallery, and learn more about the 2025-2026 season at the following link: https://art21.org/series/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s12/