Lenka Clayton | Five thousand and fifty years, two hundred and twenty yards

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 23, noon-2 pm

San Francisco, CA: Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to announce Five thousand and fifty years, two hundred and twenty yards, our first media room exhibition with artist Lenka Clayton.   On view April 23 – May 28, 2016, the exhibit features the videos People in Order – Age (2006) and The Distance I Can Be From My Son (2013).  Clayton’s fresh explorations of weighty themes—power, fragility, and the fleeting nature of age—complement Josephine Taylor’s radical departure, Teenagers Are Beautiful, a solo exhibit of works on paper in the main galleries.

Lenka Clayton’s formal degrees in both Fine Art and Documentary Filmmaking imbue her videos with a unique, liminal quality, landing her work somewhere between these two disciplines.  Clayton’s People in Order videos show her ability to fold the fundamental element of documentary storytelling into the artistic endeavour of representing and reframing the shared experience of aging.  People in Order – Age is one of a series of four short films that collect and organize hundreds of video portraits of strangers met in cities, towns, and villages across Great Britain. Lenka Clayton and James Price filmed  the  series  over  a  six-week period, while touring the UK  by  camper  van.  The  vast  majority  of  the  471 participants filmed were strangers whom they met on the street that day.  The film series, commissioned by UK Channel 4 Television, was broadcast after the evening news on four consecutive nights in May 2006.  Films which complete Clayton & Price’s People in Order series are Birth (24 women from 4 to 41 weeks of pregnancy); Love (48 couples arranged by length of their relationship from 77 years to to 2 weeks); and Home (73 households in descending order of yearly income in British pounds, £400,000 – £3,240).  Clayton herself appears in the film at her then current age of 28 years old.

Obstruction is one of Lenka Clayton’s main working materials.  She is drawn to ideas that seem herculean: hand-numbering 7,000 stones, finding the 630 people mentioned by name in a single edition of a newspaper, or writing and sending a hand-written letter to every household in the world.  The Distance I Can Be From My Son was created by Clayton during her tenure as the official Artist in Resident in Motherhood, a residency structured entirely around the idea of reframing obstruction.  Designed by the artist and funded by the Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments and Sustainable Arts Foundation, An Artist Residency in Motherhood takes place inside in an environment traditionally considered inhospitable to the creation of art; the artist’s home and life as a mother of two young children. During the residency (2012 – 2015), Clayton aimed to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time, and countless distractions of parenthood as her working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome.  The film, which features her one-and-a-half year old son Otto running off in a variety of settings, is one of 32 projects completed by Clayton during the residency.  While Clayton’s work chronicles the universal experience of the parent and child relationship, her film is also part of larger project.  Clayton offers viewers a long-term mental shift that subverts the romanticized notion of the unattached artist and reframes motherhood as a valuable site for exploration and artistic production, rather than an invisible, unappreciated labor.