Sara Clendening

In her new group of sculptures, Sara Clendening centers on utilitarian objects and the urban ornament, the latter as decor and deterrent. Such architectural "flourishes", in particular the fleur de lis, which elegantly tops private property's enclosing gates, soon baldly becomes—to a burglar or crestfallen passerby—an impaler, a poker, a renderer of flesh. Along with a small caged concrete lion with one paw raised (no sphere underneath), a plastic trashcan, a rainwater gutter, and a sun faded bed sheet cum kitchen curtain, in Clendening's hands become retroactive harbingers of dissolved states of grace. Yet she takes thorough repossession of each through the neutralizing effects of plaster, fiberglass, and time .

This holds especially true for "Love is a Trash Can", a malodorous receptacle arguably made "clean" with the expressive randomness of "love" and fiberglass, while the external face remains smooth. A similar inversion is also found in "Floret", a fleur de lis (the long dead symbol of ancient French Heraldry), its petals as soft as blades, that now hangs her dirty clothes.

The city's residents arm themselves with ornaments and Clendening strips them down to their inherent beginnings and conclusions. In "Wrong Hole", a plaster cast of an old hole to find a 'secret door' to her then lover's adjoining studio (the actual door was three feet to the left), such a gesture cannot be more crystallized. While Clendening couples the allometry of ornaments with urban blight, and the interior remnant with personal upheaval, she hews the ragged utensil, a trashcan in this case, into a new beginning.

-Max Maslansky

Sara Clendening was born in Philadelphia in 1980. Her work has been shown at The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Team Gallery in New York, and Night Gallery in Los Angeles among others.