Monet Clark

A performance, video and photographic artist working on both sides of the camera in wryly humorous, semi-autobiographical, feminist pieces.

The thing about esoteric work is that each culture’s mystic practices speak to the same truths that now neuroscience & sub-atomic physics are addressing, as science is finally understanding many things which indigenous peoples & many culture’s across millennia have known all along. Its all coming to the forefront now as humanity faces its own extinction if the dominant mindset doesn’t open to understand a few basic things…

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At mystic painter Hilma af Klint’s magnificent exhibition at the Guggenheim NYC, with their largest attendance: 600,000 visitors! This painting reminded me of Taoist Chinese Yin/Yang philosophy, & the poster for my collaboration NOW, A Video Art Ritual & the Swan helmet my character wore. The thing about esoteric work is that in each culture the knowledge speaks of the same truths, & now neuro-science & sub-atomic physics speak of the same truths, as science is finally understanding many things which indigenous peoples, & many culture’s across millennia, have known. Its all coming to the forefront now as humanity faces its own extinction if the dominant mindset doesn’t open to understand a few basic things. The feminine principal is = to the masculine, & nature is alive & its plants, water ways & animals are sentient. What we do to nature we do to ourselves. We need balance, we need to look at the biosphere of the earth holistically, & we need to use technology that works with the Earth. It has been revealed that the planting of 1.2 trillions trees will cancel out a decade of C02 emissions. Obviously this means the billionaires & governments that are conscious enough need to get to work, but each of us can plant trees too. So PLANT SOME TREES. Lets move humanity forward. The light is always brighter than the dark. We can do this.

I Am Nature exhibition Art and Cake and Diversions LA reviews

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“In Monet Clark’s color photographs, the artist casts herself in the performative role of hybridized ingenue, a sexualized woman operating within a catastrophic landscape. In each  image, she appears objectified, or “acted upon” by the viewer’s probing gaze, yet the space she occupies suggests environmental devastation, or at the very least, the leavings of our human existence.”
–Eve Wood, Art and Cake LA
 
“Monet Clark’s color photographs, give us images that point to the invasion of the natural world by human beings, and the destructions that cavalier dominance can cause.”
-Genie Davis, Diversions LA
 
 

Opening night photos for I Am Nature exhibition in Los Angeles and writings about my Performance in Nature series. Next event is an artist’s talk 4.17.19 7-9pm

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I Am Nature at Loft at Liz’s 453 So. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles curated by Gary Brewer. We had a great turn out for opening night… Exhibition runs through 4/29/19 hours 10am-6pm Mon – Sat
Sculptor Peter Shelton taking in Monet’s Performance in Nature works
Exhibiting artists Xu DaRocha (top) & Charles Dickson (bottom)
Monet Clark with artists Jennifer Locke, Charles Christopher Hill, & Penny Slinger
Monet with artist Little Sticky Rice
Monet with painter Torrey Bridgeman & his wife Zuzie
Monet & her father
Monet with her aunt & uncle & artist Jennifer Locke
Performance In Nature (Propane Tank)

The Performance in Nature series explores human being’s relationship to nature, sexual stereotypes, class, dichotomy and paradox. It juxtaposes a reverence for the natural world and a recognition of its sentience, with the visual language of advertising, pop culture and the fashion world. With wry humor the images reflect the multifaceted implications that are a part of the capitalistic visual machinery, which through sexually charged iconography is simultaneously exploitative and reductive, liberating and empowering. These pieces contemplate the connection between the treatment of women and the degradation of our environment, and ultimately human beings oneness with the natural world. Monet works in front of and behind the camera in her long standing method of framing her real life events as performances which are documented with still images, and in her semi-autobiographical performance/video pieces. These images are shot in a town of northern California where Monet has returned throughout her life, after being raised in the Back to Nature subculture of the area in the 1970s.

-Monet Clark

The title for this show is a reference to a meeting between Jackson Pollock and Hans Hoffman.

In 1942 Lee Krasner invited her former teacher, Hans Hoffmann, to visit Pollock’s studio. After some time looking at Pollock’s paintings, Hoffman noticed that there were no still lifes or models. He then said to Pollock, “You do not work from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself.  You work by heart, not from nature.” Pollock answered: “I am nature”.

This story represents the Dionysian vision that Pollock and his peers felt about their process of discovery. They believed that they were delving into the deepest mythic aspect of being. Their ethos was to liberate the creative forces that surge through consciousness and touch the creative spark that animates life.

Pollock did indeed believe that we are nature; that in our raw untethered state we breathe with the pulse of autumn rhythms, the cadence of the stars and tidal movements as they swell and swoon. A vision he ultimately realized in the epic canvases he painted in the 1950’s.

This exhibition is a look through this lens of what “I am nature” means to a group of contemporary artists working today. Some of the artists create work that focuses on the ever-expanding ideas that attempt to define the elusive contours of this living universe. I have asked other artists in this exhibition, whose work is not primarily about nature, to create work that reflects a response to this theme.

When Jackson Pollock said, “I am nature” in 1942, the knowledge of space exploration, dark matter, black holes, DNA and cloning were unknown or only speculated upon, at the outer margins of science. The world that we now live in, with nuclear weapons and the impact that civilization has had on the environment, are realities that were unknown at that time and have altered our understanding of ourselves and nature.
Indeed we are nature, and the creative act is fundamentally an expression of the deep currents and rhythmic pulse of life. With wit and alacrity, this show seeks to explore the philosophical implications of what these words mean to artists in the 21st century.

– Gary Brewer, curator