CATHLEEN CLARKE: Morning Star

Night Gallery is delighted to announce Morning Star, an exhibition of new paintings by Cathleen Clarke. This is Clarke’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery, following her inclusion in The Wrong Sea, Night Gallery x Dunes, Portland, ME (2024).

In the titular work, a yellow sun adorns a bright red barn. A starry mark on a horse’s teal snout offers a visual rhyme, another reflection of the cosmos here on earth. A blue figure holds reins that appear to blur into a forest, further connecting the worlds of the natural and the manmade. This hazy, borderless quality permeates all the work in Morning Star. Suns have faces, while bodily contours dissolve into air.

Clarke takes inspiration from family photographs and her recollections of the rural Illinois farm where she grew up. Her mother painted a sunrise mural across the family’s red barn, an incident the artist calls the beginning of her creative life. To this day, she continues to explore representations of nature and domesticity. Her paintings suggest the potency of memory and a sublime integration of human and environment.

Clarke’s process, too, evokes the presence and absence integral to any act of remembrance: Each time we think of the past, and what’s been lost, our memories shift. The artist continuously loosens her paint as her compositions progress. She wipes her surfaces, blurring her images until she reaches an ideal tension between recognition and distortion.

Clarke also notes a disparity between day and night on the farm, between sunlit pastures and the moonlit activities of coyotes, who preyed on more vulnerable animals in the middle of the night. Her palette similarly negotiates between shadow and light.

As the artist hovers between past and present, reality and dream, thresholds become a natural metaphor. Windows, stairs, doors, and ladders appear throughout her paintings. In The Porch of Shadows, figures young and old dapple a porch, which is divided into three sections by two long, brown bars. Many of the figures wait behind blue guardrails, which themselves seem to ripple with anticipation. In the middle section, a man in a white shirt places one foot on a step, one foot on the porch, poised between the residence and what lies beyond. “This is a painting of these people from my past,” the artist says. “They’re welcoming the viewer back home.”