Now What

Now What

Mar 6–May 11, 2014

March 6 – May 11, 2014
Middle Gallery

Featuring Clair Watson

Contemporary at Blue Star announces Now What, an exhibition by Water Mill, NY based artist Claire Watson, from March 6 through May 11, 2014. An Opening Reception will take place Thursday, March 6 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm, and is open and free to the public.

BIOGRAPHY:

Claire Watson, a native of Texas, earned a BFA at the University of Texas and an MFA at Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia. She has worked as a model maker, scenic artist, decorative painter, copy editor, museum educator, and as an art instructor at Middlebury College, Rutgers University, Dowling College and other diverse settings while making and exhibiting sculpture over a thirty-year career. Her awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1990 and a Fellowship in Sculpture from New York Foundation for the Arts in 2007. She lives in Water Mill, New York with her husband, artist Stephen Laub, and their two sons.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I read a lot of history, and have an intense interest in exploring the past by looking at its artifacts. Certain objects, especially hand-held objects, are intimate links to the individuals who once used and perhaps cherished them. I’m particularly drawn to collections of articles that display endless varieties of uniqueness within the confines of their types.

Tobacco pipes and kid gloves are personal effects that represent ideals of the masculine and the feminine from the era of my childhood. Pipes, as organs of respiration, and gloves, as second skins, also double as extensions of the body, and perfect embodiments of functional form.

In my studio, they are recombined with a material idiom that includes leather, rope, wire, wood, sawdust, sand and hair. Titles are important to my process; in that my once-fluent French and a stubborn literal-mindedness have parts to play in creating “figures of speech” about anachronism, gender roles, hierarchy and scale.