Clair Joy
New Work
2 October - 24 October 1992
Rear Window, 58 Lambs Conduit Street, London WC1
Clair Joy has always worked within a landscape tradition for the potential it offers to explore states of being, working at a point where self and symbol seem to be in a continual state of flux.
This point is explored in a play between three different kinds of space: the sensual; undifferentiated “no space” of the imaginary, a narcissistic mirrored space often using the represented surface of water, and the differentiated space of the symbolic often suggested by a blue sky void or a distant horizon.
In recent works, made on single large canvases, photographic images of details of water or clouds and sky are projected onto a surrounding image which seems derived from it, but in which all symbolic definition is dissolved into a sensual and abstract field.
In her studio, these recent canvases are further juxtaposed with floor based plaster casts, rectangular, inert, stolid and bearing the random marks of their casting. Positioned as the viewer might be, they suggest the solidification of a determining and helpless moment of construction.
Over the last few years, Clair Joy has exhibited work at the Nicola Jacobs Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Venice Biennale
