Monet Clark
b. Los Angeles, 1968
Monet Clark is a video artist, photographer and performance artist working with eco-feminist themes and wryly humorous characters. With complex costuming she references sub-culture, pop culture, Old Hollywood, marginalized groups and history. Often capturing her performances in the natural world with still and/or video cameras on tripods Monet’s works addresses sexual stereotypes, objectification, cultural taboos, ritual and nature’s sentience. Currently she is using oft shunned female archetypes and animal/woman hybrid characters to explore the relationship between internalized misogyny, animal rights, disability and our ailing global biosphere, or what she calls “holistic intersectionality”.
Monet started to frame her world through an Instamatic camera in grade school, and in high school formally trained in 35mm photography and silver gelatin printing. At San Francisco State University through her junior year she minored in holistic health and majored in liberal arts, focusing on women’s studies, political science and cross-cultural ritual practices. She continued to make photographic portraits and won a competitive scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute transferring there in 1990. The same year her photographs were published in On Our Backs magazine. Monet received her BFA from SFAI in 1993.
She was exhibiting internationally and was accepted into SFAI’s performance/ video graduate program in 1992. There she completed 3 of the program’s 4 semesters, before she developed a life threatening disability and had to stop. Monet continued making art through her prolonged infirmary, framing her experiences with the misogynistic medical establishment as performances documented through self portraits. Her current eco-feminist theories and art making practice is rooted in her tri-racial ancestry, the holistic, indigenous, naturopathic and mystic disciplines she rigorously trained in to recover her health, and the decolonization of the back-to-nature California subculture in which she was raised.
Post recovery Monet began again to exhibit. This has included SFMOMA’s Now Playing series; a solo show with Krowswork Gallery, Oakland; a 10 screen performance video installation collaboration with John Sanborn at SF Camerawork; with Almost Public/Semi Exposed performance art festival, SOMArts, and Telematic Gallery in San Francisco; Chicago’s International Performance Art Festival; RETHink Art Digital, Rethymno, Greece; Bideodromo, Bilbao, Spain; Palos Verdes Art Center; and more. Her earlier shows included The Kitchen in NYC, presented by EAI; WP8, Dusseldorf, Germany; the Smart Show Art Fair, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Mondrian Hotel for the Amanda M. Obering Gallery of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California; and more.
In 2020 Monet curated the virtual Invocation Democracy, A Political and Mystical Exhibition for ProArts Commons, Oakland. In 2021 she was artist in residence with the International Living Future Institute in Portland, Oregon where she curated the show Ritual for a Living Future. In 2022, NYC’s The Interior Beauty Salon hosted her performance video work FLYING BLIND, Raven Woman, Monet Clark Interviewed by Chicken Woman, Linda Mary Montano, a collaborative work with the performance art icon. She is showing at the Museum of Northern California Art with In-Flux: Recalibrating the Unknown, Chico, California through May 12th, 2024.