Suzanne McClelland: Survey Exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Work by Suzanne McClelland (BFA 1981) is featured at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum from March 5 — September 4, 2017.
Suzanne McClelland: Just Left Feel Right, is McClelland’s first museum survey. Spanning twenty-five years, Just Left Feel Right focuses on works from specific periods of her career that share a distinctive commonality, capturing the eruptive and disparate voices of a shifting American vernacular and its rippling effect on the way we communicate in our hyperkinetic time.
McClelland is most widely known for her deft use of linguistics and her sensually textured surfaces. She mines the ways in which communities speak, collecting language and choosing words that trend, are debated, heard on street corners, and absorbed from streaming news feeds; words that are rich in meaning, that reach and multiply, that drop in and out of everyday life. The words she selects hover between materials; letters press up against each other, run off the surface, join together, dissolve, loop, and collide into and onto themselves. Employing a wide range of materials, her compositions have a rhythm and beat as they perform, throb, and swagger, capturing the cadences of our speech, mimicking the physicality of how people express themselves. Pauses, utterances, and hysteria, the inflection of tone and the modulation of our tempo, bodily expressions and gesticulations, all are translated into painterly rhythmic compositions modeled after oratory repartee.
McClelland seizes these audible sensations, stealing words right out of the mouth, but also embodying our micro-expressions. In 2012, she began to incorporate numbers into her work as a reaction to the data onslaught of the Internet age. A mind-numbing rush of streaming lists for everything and anything are published on the Web. McClelland, a collector of messaging, in particular emotive and directional information, began researching the data that represents the individual and vice versa. This endless data stream is how twenty-first century society forecasts outcomes: from steady news spills that flood the imaginations, to engineering distorted images about identity and body type, and (in)forming biased estimates and postures. With the rise of social media as a primary source of content, opinion is now often misread as “news.”
Suzanne McClelland: Just Left Feel Right
Exhibition Dates: March 5 — September 4, 2017
Opening Reception: 2 — 5 pm Sunday, March 5, 2017
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main St, Ridgefield, CT 06877