In her work, Kate Clements explores the ambiguity of fashion—its capacity for imitation and distinction, its juxtaposition of the artificial and the natural. She sees the life cycle of fashion as a process of creative destruction by which the “new” replaces the “old,” yet nothing is truly new.  By the time a new style has been produced for mass consumption, it has been cast aside or even rejected by elite society as a bi-product of class division. For the exhibition, Clements presented two series of containers: one in the form of large scale glass frames void of subjects; and the other as a series of furniture pieces that operated as nests for now missing objects. 

Both of these series for the Art Alliance focused on what ‘things’ we choose to value and how and where we display them since she considers the conventions of display and representation in the museum, the home, and the department store as not all that different. They created a sense of worth in the object through indicators such as velvet and boundaries to manipulate our desires. Clements’ exhibtion expressed humor through the oddity of the work while simultaneously acknowledging sadness in recognizing the futility of many material objects.  

Clements’ choice of materials acknowledged and embraced ideas of imitation. Glass represented a counterfeit to jewels; wood vinyl covering cheap plywood created the illusion of solid oak.  Cut outs suggested the absence of an object that is no longer there, present only through its trace. These imitations and absences acted as a veil of protection, ultimately removed when the viewer comes to discover what attracted them to the work were its deficiencies.

Kate Clements received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2011 and came to Philadelphia in 2013 from the Midwest to pursue her MFA in glass at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University where she was awarded a University Fellowship.  Clements has shown nationally at venues including the Bullseye Glass Galleries, Portland, OR; Leedy-Volkus Gallery, Kansas City, MO; H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO; the Pittsburgh Glass Center, PA; and the Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA. Her work has been featured in Italian Vogue Gioiello magazine and she was recent recipient of the Academic Award from Bullseye Glass: Emerge 2014, A Showcase of Rising and Evolving Talents in Kiln-Glass.

 

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