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Statement
All screens exist in space. Working across disciplines, I use metaphor and direct intervention to understand the messy underside of digital infrastructure. In my installations, video work, and drawings, I brush objects against their stock photos. I turn a digital drawing into a clothesline of images. I weave ethernet cables into an unruly architecture and sew screenshots from my life into a quilt to sleep under. I create a breezeblock concrete wall of screens. I stuff ziplock bags full of detritus and personal images, and these become plastic analogies for zip files, e-waste, and digital storage.
Growing up queer in the rural midwest, the digital world was essential source of connection and self-invention. At the same time, I watched technology begin to encroach on the cornfields around me as large tech companies built million square-foot server farms on top of agricultural land. My artwork, scholarship, and poetics interrogate this experience of displaced embodiment through a queer lens. The environmental consequences of hidden infrastructure, from data server farms to dystopic suburban architecture, find form. Inspired by traditions of quilting, weaving, collage, and even laundry, the scrapyard of everyday objects become the groundwork to communicate a more complex technological reality. Throughout it all, my hope is to push beyond the screen and into the rooms on the other side.
Bio
Kelly Clare is a multidisciplinary artist and poet based in Western Massachusetts. Her artwork, scholarship, and poetics question organized time, the boundaries between the digital and the material, and the environmental consequences of hidden infrastructure. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa, and has shown her work both nationally and internationally in solo and group shows. Her visual and literary work appears and is forthcoming in FENCE, Second Factory, Tagvverk, and New Delta Review. She is an Editor at Ghost Proposal and was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2019.
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