Krista Clark “Virgin Greens”

Spencer Brownstone Gallery

This event has ended.

Spencer Brownstone Gallery presents Virgin Greens, Krista Clark’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a new series of collages and wall sculptures, the exhibition is a continuation of Clark’s exploration of the politics and poetics of space.

Virgin Greens is a term charged with meaning together and separately, and often with overlapping connotations. Untouched, new, novice, sacred, rebirth, plant matter, life, sacred gardens, undefiled land. Krista Clark’s practice has largely served as an external investigation into the idea of shelter and her personal observations of its manifestations in architecture, aesthetics, and politics. Virgin Greens is a meditation on green spaces and introspection, a confrontation of our own metaphysical gardens that need tending to.

A recurring motif in Clark’s work is the arch, a prominent feature in many styles of architecture, often alluding to an entryway into sacred spaces. Visitors are met with an arcade of collages on the south wall, featuring overlaid arches in diverse arrangements. The careful presentation of pastel greens and vibrant oranges are reminiscent of architectural blueprints, games, and traditional cartography. Clark points out that the arch, first used as a wonder-form of load bearing and later as a mandorla of Christian iconography, recalls the outlines of basketball courts when flipped.

Opposite the south wall is Mother, Daughter, and (after artist Barkley Hendricks’s Father, Son, and…[1969], a study of basketball’s geometry and movement painted in a triptych of arches). Shrouded in dark green, the pair of concrete and wood arches are bridged by a church pew book rack, ubiquitous in places of worship. Placed within the book rack is Alice Walker’s In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens.

The garden is a vivarium, a microcosm of life and the human desire to cultivate and control. Emanating from loss and grief, Virgin Greens is a reaction, a processing, and the unpracticed tending that often follow those experiences.

Krista Clark (b. Burlington, VT) currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her BFA from Georgia College of Art, her MFA from Georgia State University. Her work is in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta. Clark’s work has been featured at the New Museum Triennial in New York, Studio Museum in Harlem, Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York, Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta, RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, The United States Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and the High Museum in Atlanta. She is a recipient of the Artadia Award and the Working Artist Project Award with MOCA GA. Krista Clark is an Assistant Professor at Morehouse College.