In an exceptional exhibition of a radical if not avante-garde representation of the tension between life and death, Ms. Claire Chambless proudly presents bold sculptural forms with a plethora of material, especially hydroxyapatite – the base material found in bone – with a subtle affirmation of living. It is in this challenging yet exhilarating representation of abstract concepts of (per Oswald Spengler) life-tension which brings out the need for celebration. It is here where fine arts is expanded in human imagination through the origination with such dangerousness in its appearance.

Yet why would this be qualified as dangerous? How often is bone thought of as beautiful? It prima facia relates to that lacking of the animation of the body, and therefore converges more towards thoughts of the grave. Yet where is graven imagery contained herein? The most haunting of the works, Ghost Complex II, 2024, with its doll-house-esque completeness of the residency – in pure unvarnished blackness contained on the inside of the skeleton formation of a mansion – does not approach creepiness. And with that, eerie becomes recognizable.

 

Yet further, does one experience a jolt with such a confrontation of an affirmation of life, and of therefore more experiences of beauty? And what of true beauty? Is not the affirmation of the good life to constantly be impressed with its immortal resonance?

 

Perhaps the smelling salt of being this close to bone, so sculpted to originate a challenge to the mind, of not fearing but alerting with vulnerability of its own experience of the preciousness of being awake, is an extension of a new idea of truth. Not of a frantic anxious haste to inhale, to voraciously engulf or devour, in an insecurity from lacking the anticipation of one’s final destiny. Ms. Chambless presents, instead, a gentle, delicate, forensic examination into the significance of art itself with such bravado.

Glaringly absent from her work is the gruesome; there is an independency, then, from concepts of violence. And hence, a more organic nativity to her restless soul, such as with Spare Me The Heroics, 2023. The collection of oyster shells which fashion a feather-boned idea of perhaps facetious vainglory, of the ornamental decay which is imbued with more life – unto an everlasting significance, yet with the modesty in not seeming to be pretentious in its high-artistry.

TOTAL MEMORY, 2023 is the artwork with the most blaring congruency to skeleton form. In the vacillation of life and death, what else is memory but a celebration of persistence? And how marvelous to relate this concept as higher in its striving for representing a persistence of memory without the man-made image of time?

This self-reliance with the unmistakable nakedness of bone – that aeonic natural media – that dominates the senses, provides us with a richness to the comfort of experiencing brutal truth. Yet is this brutality physically intense in its extension in our perceptual space? Does it jostle us with an elephantine exuberant trampling? Or are we rewarded for being brave and experiencing media which is this close to discomfort about our ignorance of the fragility of our ordinary waking experience? So we must not be forgetful, then, in savoring our memories. That is a choice to live more, away from choosing to live less.

 

For more information, please contact the gallery:

 

Carlye Packer

2111 SUNSET BLVD

LOS ANGELES CA 90026

 

Wednesday – Saturday

11 am – 5 pm

310-482-6975

office@carlyepacker.xyz