Supawich Weesapen, The Comet, the Soul, and its Reflection (2022), via Clearing
Marking its entry in summer group show season, Clearing Gallery has opened MADE IN THE DARK, a selection of works that unifies five artists along lines of the phenomenological, spiritual and material. Drawing on otherworldly images, surreal interpolations of the human body, and figures that push the familiar into strange new territories, the show makes for a fascinating outing, exploring the thresholds of worldly and otherworldly phenomena through modes of mysticism and skepticism, on through fragmented and material negotiations.
Made in the Dark (Installation View), via Clearing
Painter Clayton Schiff’s anthropomorphic forms are a fitting entry in the show, decontextualizing urban and rural landscapes with strange faces, peculiar bodies, and soft, muted tones that inject an air of melancholy into the proceedings, and turn the works into darker meditations of existentialism and distance. By contrast, Supawich Weesapen’s light-drenched paintings are inspired by cosmic phenomena, injecting a sense of otherworldliness into our tangible environments. Anticipation is palpable in the works; confident hues of green and violet erupt, converging and radiating beyond the canvases. The works recall UFO sighting videos, strange dashcam footage, and other artefacts of a digital modernity while injecting that familiarity with a renewed sense of abstraction.
Eli Ping, Monocarp 1 (2023), via Clearing
Valerie Keane, Untitled (2015), via Clearing
Other works on view take on an extended sense of sculptural and spatial distension. Valerie Keane’s poetry of composite forms makes aware the making and unmaking of our bodies, creating sensory armors that become a vessel for our projections. Fragments of aluminum, steel, and plastic are conjoined, stitching together non-functional mechanical forms that become a proxy for the human figure. Meanwhle artist Eli Ping’s canvas sculptures draw on delicate pleats that fold and unfold as they inch toward the sublime. Ping begins by hanging a canvas on the ceiling and pouring resin over the material, letting the fabric succumb to gravitational forces; an invisible sculpting hand. Frozen cotton spires imminently drape and tower over one another, creating a self-sustaining sculpture that bears the weight of time while exuding a supreme lightness.
The show closes August 25th.
Clayton Schiff, Bask (2023), via Clearing
– D. Creahan
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Clearing Gallery [Exhibition Site]
