Catharine Clark Gallery will close its 2025 program with three solo exhibitions: Lenka Clayton’s The Past (North Gallery), Katherine Vetne’s Between Worlds (South Gallery), and Nanci Amaka’s Cleanse / Floors (Media Room). Collectively, the exhibitions reflect on women’s labor, the reimagining of domestic spaces, and memory as a creative force. All three will be on view from October 11, 2025, to January 3, 2026.
The exhibition will be complemented by three ticketed BOXBLUR events: musicians from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra with singers will perform on October 15 and 17, and the San Francisco Dance Film Festival will screen films on November 4. Details are at the end of this press release. Both programs have been curated in response to the work in the three exhibitions.
Lenka Clayton’s exhibition The Past continues her interest in depicting the everyday through drawing. The images are made with a 1957 Smith Corona typewriter. Clayton’s acclaimed work involves daily situations, extending the familiar into the poetic and the absurd. Her newest series of “Typewriter Drawings” playfully responds to commonly shared experiences and grapples with issues of acceptance and control.
Clayton writes: “Since 2012, when I first accidentally made a typewriter drawing while in Paris, I have developed a deep, subconscious relationship with the process of thinking through typing. This boils down to something like: 'start making one drawing and the title for the next one will come.' While living life, I try to pay attention to things: the fly that is always there, the point when newly applied paint overtakes the old paint, the everyday magic of magnetism… Then I remember and memorialize these things by depicting them as drawings rendered with a clunky old Smith-Corona—which, after the 13 years of misuse and battery I have subjected it to, as well as decades of writing invoices or obituaries or whatever it was doing before—can now barely write a legible M, Z, or T, and its ‘_’ key is indented by tiny arcs from millions of fingernail strikes.
” Some of the drawings depict minor mishaps, such as a fly that inadvertently appears on a photocopier or the residue on a shelf from an overwatered plant. Others are humorous, like a rendering of sheet music for Leonard Cohen’s song “Bird on a Wire,” with birds as proxies for the notes. In this body of work Clayton also introduces red as a formal and conceptual element. The color is derived from the red typewriter ribbon that was a mainstay of some typewriters, particularly those used for accounting and bookkeeping to highlight negative numbers and credits. Clayton uses it in a work titled The NonMiraculous Part, which depicts a red plastic fortune-telling fish. The fortune teller, miracle fish is made of sodium polyacrylate; if you place it in your hand, it will bend and wiggle in response to your hand’s moisture. Its movements can reportedly be deciphered to predict the future. But these movements—though they may seem miraculous—are a result of the fish's chemical composition, not magic.
To view a short video of Lenka Clayton discussing her “Typewriter Drawing” series, please click the following link: https://vimeo.com/130099657