South Gallery

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.

With her work in the exhibition Between Worlds, Katherine Vetne approaches the genre of still life through the lens of unreality and dissociation. Her exquisitely rendered metal point drawings on prepared chalk panels depict fancy tableware and vases as if they were foreign or otherworldly specimens. The once familiar becomes uncanny. Drawn using metal point, a technique developed during the Renaissance, Vetne’s mark-making is created with a piece of gold or silver as if it were graphite, on a prepared ground sometimes tinted with pigments. The high level of detail is achieved using handmade metal tools to draw, such as wire shaped like a stylus and aluminum wool fashioned into a kind of "brush." Vetne combines metal point drawing with other media, such as graphite, casein, gouache, or egg tempera.

While the work for this exhibition focuses on the uncanny to a greater degree than in previous projects, Vetne’s fascination with objects that represent markers of life events for women—like marriage—and often stemming from traditional ideas about aspiration and desire, informs her choice of subject matter. Vetne writes: “For this body of work, I amassed a collection of porcelain and glass tchotchkes, including objects by Fenton, Capodimonte, Lenox, and others. I used raking light sources, uncanny perspectives, and disheveled arrangements to render them with an eerie detachment. My goal was to create friction between these signifiers of taste and decorum and the legacies of violence necessary to uphold the social division that created them. As I worked, I realized that the work was also channeling a feeling of psychological dissociation.”

She continues: “These objects, intended for dinner parties and curated China cabinets, represent a presumed owner’s ascension to a certain social class of well-mannered wealth. In these works, they reside within a purgatory-like, in-between realm. The rumpled textiles, overturned vessels, and darkened atmospheres suggest that the viewer is tenuously situated in space after some recent unnerving moments and before an uncertain future. The porcelain figurines of plants and animals feel frozen in time. The Fenton and Lenox vases feel like objects and ideas of the past, yet they persist in our current day. In this show, domestic decorations feel trapped in the amber of their own unsettling environments, underscoring a transitional moment as political and corporate power become increasingly entwined.”

At a political moment when roles for women seem to be reversing course with a growing interest in traditional values expressed through the phenomenon of “trad wives” on social media, Vetne’s work reminds us of the darker side of these conventional roles and the material items that sometimes emblematize them.