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, Old Hollywood, advertising, marginalized groups, history and more. Often capturing her performances in the natural world with still and video cameras on tripods, Monet’s works addresses sexual stereotypes, objectification, exploitation, cultural bias, 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 recovery, and repair of our 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, radical politics, and cross-cultural ritual practices. She continued to make photographic portraits of San Francisco’s rich subculture and won a competitive scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, transferring there in 1990. The same year her photographs were published in the On Our Backs lesbian magazine. Monet received her BFA from SFAI in 1993.
Exhibiting internationally and accepted into SFAI’s performance/video graduate program in 1992, she completed 3/4s of the program before developing a life threatening disability precipitated by a toxic exposure and was forced to discontinue. With the feminist and civil rights slogan in mind “The personal is political” Monet continued making art through her prolonged infirmary, framing her experiences with the misogynistic and corporate medical establishment as performances, documented through self portraits.
Her eco-feminist theories and art making practice is rooted in her tri-racial ancestry and the familial decolonization her family underwent within the back-to-nature California subculture she was raised. The holistic-naturopathic, indigenous, and mystic disciplines she has rigorously trained in to recover her health have further shaped her work.
Post recovery Monet began again to exhibit. This has included SFMOMA’s Now Playing series; the Northern California Museum of Art, Chico; a solo exhibition 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, all in San Francisco; Chicago’s International Performance Art Festival; RETHink Art Digital, Rethymno, Greece; Bideodromo, Bilbao, Spain; Palos Verdes Art Center, CA; 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 she participated in the accelerator international performance art program EmergeNYC, and the virtual Interior Beauty Salon from NYC 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.