Morgan Lehman is pleased to present "Maxwell's Lair", new paintings and installation by New York based artist Emilie Clark. This is Clark's second solo show with the gallery. Clark has long been interested in 19th Century women naturalists who defied dominant social expectations of their time. She has used their lives and practices as a point of departure in two previous series based on Mary Treat (1830-1923) and Mary Ward (1827-1869), resulting in shows based on several years of research, accumulation and creation of specimens, paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

"Maxwell's Lair" draws from the life and work of Martha Maxwell (1831-1881), a 19th Century American naturalist, who at the time had the largest collection of taxidermy in the US. Maxwell killed and prepared most of the animals in her collection and displayed them in naturalistic dioramas that she created. Her dedication and devotion to her work parallels that of an artist. Clark's paintings are derived from stuffed-animal hybrid sculptures she constructs, in addition to close observation of actual specimens-living, taxidermied and pickled.

"In her lacy amalgamations of follicles and egg sacs, nectar-coated tubes and ciliated lobes, distorted mouths and surgically reconstructed yard-sale castoffs Clark engages a longstanding fascination with botany and zoology, not to mention an investment in the liquid properties of water-based pigments and sculptural forms based on accumulation. But her dedication to direct observation and lyrical abstraction does not imply an exclusively formal-or sentimental-attachment to flora and fauna. Her laboratory-like habits cross-pollinate, sometimes perversely, with interests in the history of science, gender politics, and research as a conceptual art practice." (Frances Richard "The Killing Floor")

Referencing Maxwell's 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where she lived for the duration in a faux cave inside her own exhibit, Clark has created a small cave made of modified and dissected stuffed animals. This diorama at the entrance to the exhibition sets the mood for the rest of the show and gives viewers a chance to physically enter into her work.

Emilie Clark: Untitled, from Maxwell's Lair

Mixed media, 60 x 72 in.

Click on image to enlarge.

Clark's paintings on canvas, saturated with color and action, investigate the viscous cycle of life and death, worlds within worlds that are in a constant state of flux. Piles of animals, some realistically rendered, some as shadows, permeate the space giving visual monumentality to predator and prey. The violence and beauty portrayed in her work come together to create a visual feast. Clark's paintings of slayed animals call upon the tradition of Baroque painters representing living and hunted animals, such as Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Frans Snyder (1579-1657). Clark's work not only shares certain subject matter with these painters, but also a commitment to color, movement and sensuality. Like the paintings on canvas, her watercolors combine definitive line with controlled washes of mingled muted colors, giving an aged and traveled quality to the refreshing starkness of the crisp white of the paper. Dissected carcasses, portions of animal parts, and patterns move in and out of each other, creating an abstracted community of death and regeneration.

Emilie Clark received her BFA from Cornell University in 1991, and received her MFA from Bard College in 2001. She has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including a solo show at the MUSARC in Ferrara, Italy and a three person show at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland. She has been included in several group exhibitions in New York, including "Race Specimen" at the Arsenal, "Pondering the Marvelous" at Wave Hill, and "Poetry Plastique" at Marianne Boesky gallery. In addition to her solo projects, Clark has published a number of collaborative works with author Lyn Hejinian, and most recently a folio project from the Hui Press, "Over Cook", with poet (and husband) Lytle Shaw. Clark was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency in 2001 as well as a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant in 2003.