A reception for the artist will be held on April 23 from 6-8pm.
In considering the possibilities of how one could capture visually, the categories of air, water and food, I started to think about the literal translation of the word ecology--"earth's households," and what that would look like. If air, water and food are what biologically make up the earth's household, one is faced with the overwhelming reality that that is literally everything. Art history has a precedent for the visual space of these three categories--from paintings of the harvest and the bounty of the hunt, to landscapes populated with creatures from incompatible reaches of the earth. But whereas historical artists seemed to be interested in representing man's control and power over earth's household and nature more generally, the more I got into my project, the more I became interested in man's complete lack of control over its household. This is where the idea of the "everything" drawings came from. I had been making many smaller drawings that zoomed in on one particular world within the areas of air, water and food--a micro detail, a moment of transformation--but with the everything drawings I wanted to emphasize the complexity of interconnectivity, of transformation, of decay and corruption, and regeneration. I wanted the drawings to feel like one was within the composting process--the process that is so eloquently spoken about in Whitman's "This Compost"--"such sweet things are made of such corruptions."
Emilie Clark was born in San Francisco in 1969. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 1991, and moved to New York City from the Bay Area in 1998. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2002. Clark has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including the Lynden Sculpture Garden (Milwaukee, WI), Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose, CA), and the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN). Clark was the artist in residence at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in 2010. She exhibited twelve years of her Weekly Painting project at Morgan Lehman, New York, in October 2007, and more recently Sweet Corruptions, 2013. In New York City she is represented by Morgan Lehman Gallery and on the West Coast, by Elizabeth Leech Gallery in Portland, Oregon. In addition to her solo projects, Clark has published a number of collaborative works with author Lyn Hejinian, and most recently a folio project from the Hui Press, Over Cook, with poet (and husband) Lytle Shaw. Her medical drawings have appeared on numerous medical journals and textbook covers, including Journal of Experimental Medicine and the History of Endocrine Surgery.