An Intimate Affair

Zara Monica Wee:

I was honored to have had Clutch Gallery with me on Thanksgiving. It was a timely and apt celebration for the current exhibition Terra/Form: Cultivating A Community. What could be more communal than Thanksgiving dinner? Clutch was hereby invited to be a part of a small but great Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago’s Loop. Since Terra/Form is so much about being in a community and growing relationships, it was a perfect opportunity to bring these themes to our Thanksgiving conversations. For one, we all know that food brings people of all cultures and ethnicities together – differences aside and appetites whole! 

Clutch met many new individuals including a pet whose size matched the purse!

Clutch also paid a visit to \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/, the exhibition at the Student Union Galleries at the Leroy Neiman Center.

“Lines divide, connect, and guide. Running together through the gallery space, the works of Ailes, Goosen and Mackin provide an intersection of converging lines and bisecting practices that ultimately come together to \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/.”

http://blogs.saic.edu/sugs/about/backslashforwardslash/

Elizabeth Murray, Back on Earth, 1981

Elizabeth Murray's painting Back On Earth, 1981, at the Art Institute of Chicago, explores the relationship between figure and ground by putting together two separate canvases to form one whole image. The canvas on the lower left is geometric in shape, painted in a cool blue. The canvas on the upper right is more organic in shape and is painted a warm green. Both are part of the equation; the cold human nature versus the warmth of the earth.

On closer examination, the viewer will realize that the figure in the blue canvas actually crosses over the boundary of its own canvas, into the green canvas, with what seems like an arm and leg. With this gesture, Murray simply portrays that humans are on Mother Nature’s territory – and not the other way around.

Murray presents this image of the relationship the human race has with earth in a highly stylized and cartoonish-manner, distinct in her work. The unique asymmetrical canvases illustrate the idea of flexibility, openness toward one another. Maybe hinting at the kind of attitude that we should adopt when interacting with our own environment – whether it is human, man-made or natural. The shape of the canvases emote movement and initiate a kind of dance – this might be to Murray what the dance of life is about!

Although there is a great contrast and separation between the cool and warm canvases, this only helps to highlight a great balance between the figure and ground. This is the reason I chose this work to introduce to our audience at Terra/Form’s opening at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Like Terra/Form, Back on Earth combines two seemingly contradicting forms to co-exist in harmony. Terra/Form also hoped to reconnect artists and audiences with the earth as much as it aimed to reconnect with the communities with whom we share earth.

Terra/Form suggests that cultivating relationships in our communities can, in turn, affect our environment positively.

Zara Monica Wee

Clutch went shopping on State Street 11/24/2014

Clutch camouflaged at Anthropologie.  Chameleon-like amongst the retro trinkets (with Jess Sattell).

Terra Form Exhibition Opening

Opening Address by Jillian Marie Santora, Curatorial Team member, Terra/Form: Cultivating a Community:

Clutch Gallery is both a challenge and a joy. With just 25 square inches to curate, Clutch can at times feel incredibly restrictive and a little impossible. But throw a few people together. Read a book, specifically Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, and discuss. Walking soon becomes more than just your left foot following your right and maps suddenly turn in on themselves to reveal ever stranger, more complex realms. By virtue of Clutch’s inherent mobility, those people, tasked with curating such a tiny space, decide the thread that connects Clutch, walking, and mapping is the idea of community. Because of Clutch’s transitory nature we wanted to find a way to root the diverse backgrounds of our class. We wanted to form connections between ourselves and with others in an effort to cultivate a new community where we all belonged. And so, we terraformed Clutch. To terraform, in the science fiction sense, is to take a previously uninhabitable space and to retrofit the space to be capable of sustaining human life. The spatial limitations of clutch can then be infinitely expanded by using the conceptual mapping terraforming provides. The slash between terra and form becomes very important in this sense. Terra, meaning earth and all of its flora, and form-- to create things, to give shape, or to have a specific character. Each work of art in the gallery is an index of the artists’ relationship to their own terra, and is manifested in a miniature physical form. Each work of art is plantable, as in, you can touch each piece and place it in the ground of the gallery garden. The participatory nature allows you to form a connection, and ultimately, a community with the works, artists, docents of clutch, and others who have handled the pieces before you. So please, give yourself a few moments to kindle a relationship and help Terra/Form grow.

Terra/Form

Caught in Life's Vortex

Inspired by the way Terra/Form: Cultivating a Community brings together individuals searching for and finding community, artists Landon Williams and LaAndrea Deloyce Mitchell composed and performed everyday, a song about finding one another while traveling through life's vortex: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uc5v035cduhaupm/everyday.mp3?dl=0

Install Photos