Peculiar Reality

2-Person Exhibit | Mary Koenen Clausen & Jillian Moore

Exhibit Dates: June 26 - August 8, 2020
Virtual Reception with Mary Koenen Clausen: July 24th, starting at 5:30pm CST
Virtual Reception with Jillian Moore: July 25th, starting at 11:00am CST

Exhibit Info

Peculiar Reality

June 26 - August 8, 2020
Reception: TBD
2-Person Exhibit | Mary Koenen Clausen & Jillian Moore

*Due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, the gallery is withdrawing submissions for the national call. Instead, Peculiar Reality, will be a 2-Person exhibit with the invited gallery artists to participate: Mary Koenen Clausen and Jillian Moore. Peculiar Reality: National Juried Exhibit will be announced at a later date when threat to health becomes less of a concern. For more information about the call, visit Call for Entries.

Familiar, yet odd. Peculiar Reality brings together a collection of strange and fantastical works from Mary Koenen Clausen and Jillian Moore. Mary Koenen Clausen’s works on large paper are rich with layers, texture, color and collage. Her creations transport the viewer into a fictional environment and lets you walk around in a mystical plane rife with both recognizable and unrecognizable elements; these actors, animals, and otherworldly texts and symbols floating in orbit call attention to the heavens and the underworld in composition. Jillian Moore, whose work is rooted in the craft realm of contemporary jewelry, transforms the work into larger specimens, allowing for the viewer to carefully inspect each entity on the wall as sculpture. Gooey, bright, and colorful uses of form and material are found in these objects and inspire the viewer to attempt to categorize them in the natural world. The exhibition artworks celebrate absurdity, uncanniness, and the extraordinary.

Download Press Release

Mary Koenen clausen

Mary Koenen Clausen's mixed media collages are rich in texture and image. Her works frequently are comprised of three visual fields or planes: the heavens, earth, and underworld. Figures composed of mismatched heads and bodies float among animals, icons, musical notes, and foreign texts on backgrounds thickly painted with deep hues. Mary sees the musical notes, symbols and foreign text, many of which she reproduces in her own hand, as messages emanating from her spiritual guides while channeling energy from other time and space dimensions. She gathers her material from Italian magazines, 17th and 18th century Bibles, antique books, among other sources. Mary also uses photographs of her surroundings in her work. Her home and studio are full of paintings, photographs, wall hangings, dolls, and other collected objects, an environment that reflects the complexity of her work. Mary lives and works in Muscatine, Iowa.

Statement
Painting is a spiritual process of transforming my soul from the physical to the metaphysical. All of my paintings speak about my relationship with a heavenly spiritual realm, in which a spirit being resides who I choose to call God. I have developed a deep and personal spiritual connection to God. In my lifetime, I have studied the beliefs of many world religions and share common connections between them.
A metaphor for my work is much like the lotus flower. It first takes root in the mud. The mud contains nutrients that the lotus needs to develop and grow. As I grow in God’s heavenly spheres of love and grace, becoming divine in my being, my paintings record this process of transformation. Many of my hand written marks are the nutrients that feed the center. They act to balance the overall symmetry in my work. For me, to view my paintings is to embrace the act of surrender and to connect to the heart of God’s grace.
All my paintings are created in a meditative state. God guides my physical body as his conduit to present divine knowledge. As I meditate and I pray, the combination of symbols, images and overall design comes to me. I am at peace then, my mind and heart are graced by God.
I believe we all have incomplete soul fragments within us. I embed soul fragments into each of my paintings. The painting’s soul fragments reach out to the viewer’s soul fragments to form an emotional connection. My paintings are prescriptive in nature, in that they help to heal the owner of the piece just by being in their environment and atmosphere. They bring creative and nourishing thoughts and feelings of the viewer through their mind, heart and soul. Each viewer will share a very unique and personal experience.
My cutout central figures represent the heart of God. The collage elements audition to appear in the painting. In the beginning they co-exist, as singular forms linked to my soul’s fragments. The cutout elements perform a form of dance to create the central figures. Unity is created through the coming together of the moving pieces. This represents the awakening of God’s Heart. So, as in my paintings, the viewers of my work become engaged with the unity of the Divine.

Jillian Moore

Jillian Moore is an artist and writer based in Iowa City, Iowa working primarily in the field of contemporary jewelry and small sculpture. Her work is inspired by forms in the biological world and amplified by an interest in the fantastical. Operating with a background in metalsmithing and a foreground in experimental resins and other plastic processes, Moore's work is comprised of a variety of new materials and techniques executed with the obsessive, monomaniacal approach of her craft discipline training. "Our natural tendency to seek out patterns results in a sensitivity to the congruities in biological forms. Deliberate exploitation of these phenomena results in objects that are both ambiguous and evocative. Some are organs removed from the body in which they once belonged, revealing structures with unknown functions.”

Statement for “Peculiar Reality”
There are two distinct groups of work in this exhibition, though that was not my intention. There are the pieces I began before the Covid-19 shutdown, and the work I made afterward. All incorporate resin, a throughline in my practice, building it up in many successive layers to give strength, color, and pattern to forms created in a variety of found materials. All incorporate paint as well as pigments.
The “before” pieces came out of a weeklong intensive residency, the “Smitten Forum”, at Pocosin Arts in Columbia, NC. This project, aimed at contemporary jewelry makers, gave me the somewhat perverse opportunity to focus exclusively on sculptural work for the first time in over a decade. These pieces came about from deliberate sketches with full schematics outlining a somewhat methodical creation (relative to how I typically work). Foam was laminated, carved, and refined to create the forms with notes on mood that defined color and texture. Various materials were layered in with plans on how they would later reveal themselves through meditative, reductive processes and added components.
Then there are the “after” pieces, comprised mainly of the “Lumpen” series, that were constructed in a frenzy. With nowhere to go, and for the first time in a long while, a luxuriously open schedule, I channeled my anxiety at the moment into these pieces. They are reflexive, sketched only in process. Materials were layered in, but intuitively and spontaneously. I lost track of what went into each piece, though all were built on broken bits of styrofoam and plastic that accumulated as we shifted to a life of order-by-mail quarantine, the detritus of the moment got sucked into the studio and exorcised in this way.
What unifies all of these pieces, beyond my usual materials and processes, is the blending of biological and mineralogical references filtered through abstraction. The result is both familiar and ambiguous, a museum specimen without context that asks more questions than it answers. They are ruminations on transgression as they defy easy categorization, and in their appeal, make a case for the value of abnormality.

Support for works in Peculiar Reality provided by the Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs.

Exhibit Images