we slip away like snakes leaving only the shedded skin
And The Forms Which Linger, Humming In Our Ears organized by Sophy Naess and Kari Rittenbach
with the 2024 painting and printmaking cohort
January 20-30 2024
Green Hall Gallery, Yale University, New Haven CT
Outside The Dark Pink Air, 2024, wood, plaster, cotton thread dyed with goldenrod, metal watering can, used tow strap, glass, mirror, rhinestone necklace, clips, plastic picture frame, laser print fragment, silicone, glitter, acrylic, gesso 12’ x 2’ x 2’
Parting Folds of The Sun (softly beating), 2023, painted wooden curtain rod in plastic cover, acrylic, milkweed leaves, lead, silicone, butterfly brooch, tulle, 10’ x 6”
Event Horizon, 2024, fabric, gesso, acrylic, metal, nails, 3” x 24” 2”
Breathwood Outhouse, 2024, wood, plaster, vinyl purse, egg tempera, found magazine clipping from the shitter, binder clip, acrylic, gesso, silicone, fabric, gift of pewter from E.R.’s studio, dimensions variable ( 10’ x 3’ x 4’)
We Slip Away Like Snakes Leaving Only The Shedded Skin, 2024, metal, wood, plaster, drywall mesh, acrylic, gesso, cotton thread dyed with acorns and goldenrod, photograph, milkweed seeds and pods, silicone mold scrap from E.R.’s studio, paper, water, glass, 9’ x 3’ x 3’
photos by Zeshan Ahmed
Earthen Clay’s Cooperative Architectures
text by artist and writer Emily Christine Velez Nelms
Linear assemblages defy gravity,
and beam
as they hold one another,
containing worlds ever in flux,
defined by an ethics
they built for themselves.
Earthen Clay’s cooperative architectures provide us glimpses into the pleasures of material and lived relationality. Neither exclusively sculptural nor relegated to pigmentation, the beginning of one set of assembled decisions is the ending of another. Here we are the spectator of a complex orchestra of physicality, containing time, sweat, earnest organic material, essence, and glitter.
Tended to by an intentional touch, pewter, glass, silicone, plaster, milkweed, plastic, and tulle disrupt nomenclatures of Western physics and organized systems. An expansive abstraction of revived lives and afterlives, Clay welcomes us to view the edge of an eclipse, the Parting Folds of The Sun (softly beating). Non-precarious, a choreography of endless iterations diffuses disciplinary bounds, unveiling to us the joys located in the phenomenology of living.
Closely related to their local ecology, their knowledges are constructed by the multitudes and plasticities of their ever expanding capacities to take various and unexpected forms. Clay tenderly ushers in moments long passed, but ever recurring, as spectral to the alchemy of care and generous holding, in a world predicated on extraction of every kind. We Slip Away Like Snakes Leaving Only The Shedded Skin. Wrought with memory and traces of an emotional economy that practices new ontologies of coexistence, these scaffolds of transcendence are not static, but ever assemblable. Their aftermath elucidates new structural skins, systems that bear witness to their departure from enterprise toward an embrace of infinite optimisms.
Harkening us to states of potentiality, we are invited to meet ourselves, our own associative impulses, and perhaps release self imposed confines of our realitie
following along with the movements and patterns of milkweed, fall 2023 at Yale School of Art
installation view
Adonis, 2023 steel, pewter, exercise band, polyester necktie, chalk on paper, acrylic, sand, rhinestones, nylon rope, nails
Slow Strip 2023 Italian leather purse, marble dust, photographs, golf balls, lantern fly in paper box with resin, wooden spool, bay laurel leaf, goldenrod dyed cotton string, gold earring, chalk pastel, acrylic, silicone, 20” x 30”
The above collection of images are from an installation on October 31, 2023 in the pit at Yale School of Art. All photos are by Andina Marie Osorio.
Not This Way Road
Spring 2023 Yale School of Art
installation view
Undone 2022 found purse and other objects, silicone, acrylic, pigment and inkjet print fragments 10” x 5”
Matter Feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers 2022 wood, plaster, found objects, acrylic, photocopies 2’x3’x 15”
detail of Matter Feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers 2022 wood, plaster, found objects, acrylic, photocopies 2’x3’x 15”
Compact Mirror, 2022, found materials, silicone, plaster, acrylic, milkpaint, pigment, 3’x 3’
detail of Compact Mirror, 2022, found materials, silicone, plaster, acrylic, milkpaint, pigment, 3’x 3’
installation view
Waiting (click clack of the heel) found objects, silicone, acrylic, inkjet print fragments 2022 10’x1’
The above collecton of images are from an installation in the pit at Yale School of Art Spring 2023. All photos are by Pat Garcia Jr.
A motley crew of about 7 or 8 of us assembled down by the shitter nearest the main cabin. Slick sweat streaked queens wearing tight blue wranglers and boots or a neon yellow thong with a cut up crop top and bandana wrapped around his nose and mouth. Pulling on work gloves we quickly organized into smaller groups of one person taking the shovel into the bowels of the shitter and another at the ready with the wheelbarrow. Once full, pushing it uphill across the gravel way past little groups of tulle, wigs, glitter and heels gossiping and laughing, down past the kitchen house music blasts with sounds of lunch being prepared laughing and down into the orchard where a dancing hottie shovels pulled wilted weeds onto the pile of decomposing shit where it will sit for a season or so until it gets spread under the fruit trees. I grip the wheelbarrow as tight as I can sweat making it threaten to slip out of my strong hands and careen down the hill into the steaming pile. But I keep control and empty my load, turning around with a smile at the cutie and head back toward the shitter for another fill. By this time Charming has gone deep inside scraping out the dregs of last year’s shit having accumulated until now. As soon as he finishes another is ready and waiting with an empty wheelbarrow, With Enthusiasm! We find condoms, douche pipets, wrappers and undecomposed corncobs and tough citrus rinds. We’re having fun now blasting music and making it cute. Showing off as we strain our muscles in the sun pushing the wheelbarrow, flexing at the other queers like look I’m shoveling your shit babe, you can thank me later, or never - eyes twinkling.