Furtive Gesture - CEDEpart2

October 13 - December 14, 2013

Solo Exhibition, University of Albany Museum of Art, SUNY

Riffing off the word cede and its homonym seed, McClelland's hybrid presentation considers the many ways in which power shifts, separates, and grows. As in all her work, this newly conceived installation can be "read" on many levels and is meant to be experienced in a physically immersive way. It begins with a wide chalk board band that spans the circumference of the museum's second floor gallery and serves as a ground for over 300 poster-size inkjet prints, paintings, and spontaneous chalk drawings mounted in accumulated layers. The whole piece is splayed out at eye level like an unbound book so that one must actually walk the circle in order to read it.

Culling freely from a vast archive of contemporary source material, McClelland mixes words, images, and mediums in an unfolding rumination on the unruly, yet often calculated machinations that fuel our public life. Interspersed throughout the installation are multiple definitions and foreign translations of the word cede painted directly on the wall in McClelland's characteristic hand, excerpts from Ann Landers’ The Ten Commandments of How to Get Along with People, and names of top rappers of the 20th-century. Also included are a host of found images: handshakes between political leaders, pointing fingers of iconic figures throughout history, digitally merged portraits based on photographs of public figures with seemingly nothing in common—like Tammy Faye Baker and Newt Gingrich. McClelland deftly combines these unlikely pairings into singular images that zero in on shared hand gestures, rather than individual facial features further thwarting conventional readings of celebrity and power.