Rachel-Clarke_ELSEWHERE_AnotherYearInLA_September-October

Rachel Clarke

Abstract image of balck and muted green & purple circles and lines on a white background

ELSEWHERE

September 1 - October 31, 2021

Exhibition

Download the Merging Spaces app to see the Augmented Reality works

Exhibition Statement

Artist Resume

Elsewhere

The work in this show has been made at a time of personal loss when my awareness of what is present, absent, newly discovered – or lost forever – was greatly magnified. The experience was of a disjunction of time and space, already heightened by what has been happening simultaneously in the world around us, and bringing to mind larger questions about life and death. The ongoing Covid19 pandemic – with the death of so many, and the loss of social and economic certainties – has brought about a collective sense of grief. Meanwhile, climate change looms as an existential threat; the ongoing drought in the western US is causing devastating fires that rip through communities and destroy entire forests. In fire season the air is thick with smoke, and ash falls from the sky like snowflakes. These losses – personal, social, collective – imbue the present moment with a sense of uncertainty and tragedy.

The work demanded that I navigate this difficult terrain, channeling experience of personal loss and collective dislocation into the creative process. The source imagery for my show was my living spaces, local surroundings, and special places. With a shifted sense of reality, they felt foreign and needed to be understood differently. The imagery of these familiar spaces was moved through physical and digital processes – drawing, digital compositing, 3D simulation – and was deconstructed and recombined into new configurations. The abstracted visual elements form into imagined spaces, maps, constructions and sculptures that exist in a play between physical and digital realms, in the form of digital drawings, videos, augmented reality sculptures, and a virtual environment. The show’s title Elsewhere alludes to the different modalities in which the work was intended to be experienced: the drawings exist as digital images and large physical prints; the augmented reality works exist virtually (but within the viewer’s physical space through the screen of their camera) and the virtual installation is a manifestation of the work in a physically impossible space. The work that began with loss has been a process of constructing a new visual language that responds to my changing perceptions of human experience.

The Merging Spaces app was created by Game Developer, Mathieu Cardinal. www.linkedin.com/in/mathieu-cardinal-174132183