Allana Clarke, A Particular Fantasy

Usdan Gallery, Bennington College
November 3, 2022

Allana Clarke’s first institutional solo exhibition, A Particular Fantasy, is a collaboration between Usdan Gallery and Art Omi, with complementary installations across venues. A Trinidadian-American artist, Clarke is known for using materials such as sugar, cocoa butter and hair-bonding glue to confront histories of colonialism and Western standards of beauty. While her photographs and videos look closely at bodies, her sculptures repurpose products designed for use on bodies. Her process often begins by pouring large, thick quantities of hair-bonding glue onto a flat surface to create a “skin,” which she stretches, pulls, pleats and molds using her hands and feet. Her somatic technique transubstantiates a toxic substance into stunning objects that ripple, curl, shimmer, twist and glisten.

 

Usdan Gallery programming foregrounds ideas of process central to Clarke’s practice, with performance videos and a stage-like area for the artist to construct a 25-foot-long hair-bonding glue sculpture—her largest piece yet and the first oriented completely on the floor. During a three-week residency at Bennington, Clarke has support from student assistants and her work overlaps with gallery hours, making her process part of the exhibition and integrating it with teaching. This film of Clarke making the sculpture, by artist Cori Spencer, joins the show now that the sculpture is complete. A Particular Fantasy resonates within the history of Bennington, which in 1952 presented the first Jackson Pollock retrospective and in1958 hosted the first U.S. exhibition of the Japanese Gutai group. As Clarke’s embodied work operates within mid-century ideas of “action painting” connected to both Pollock and the Gutai, the Usdan site underscores her advancement of modernist traditions of abstraction and performance.