Claire Chambless

Claire Chambless’ sculptural works embody disparate visual languages of crowd control, war, art history, femininity, violence and intimacy. Her forms appear to exist in frozen moments of transmutation, ominously oscillating between decay and rebirth. As ghostly fragments of bleached coral reef may blossom and recover from the ravages of human intrusion, their surfaces continue to retell past dangers.

Claire Chambless (b.1989, Houston, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist whose sculptures, installations and other works grapple with the spatial politics of ideology and the complex relationship between femininity and aggression. Her autobiographical associations to everyday objects – pearls, easter eggs, crowd-control barriers – serve as starting points for cross-disciplinary research into cultural, symbolic, and critical histories which inform the materials and processes used to make the artworks. Inhabiting a conceptual liminality, her political abstractions reinterpret the poetics of modernism to account for the complexity of identity, inter-personal conflict, and the unclear boundaries between self and others that characterize our globalized, digital world.

Claire Chambless received her BA from Davidson College and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.  Her work has appeared in solo and group shows throughout the United States and in Spain, including: Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta); New Wight Biennial (UCLA – Los Angeles); MAK Center for Art & Architecture Mackey Apartments (Los Angeles); Culture Lab LIC/Flux Factory (New York);  M. David & Co. (New York); La MaMa Gallery (New York); and Lowe Gallery (Atlanta). Her work is part of the permanent collection of the City of Atlanta through the Fulton County Arts & Culture Council. Chambless was a James G. Pepper Scholar at Davidson, Lillian Disney Scholar at CalArts, a 2017-2018 Walthall Fellow and a 2017 SeedWorks resident.  Her work has been featured in ArtForum online, Burnaway, and Number magazine, among others.