Coupled

In Coupled, Dodd graduate candidates Alex McClay and Chasity Williams examine the promise and paradox of twos. Through this collaborative exhibition, they mine the ways in which humans are bound to and reflected by their material objects, personal relationships, memories, and intimate and domestic spaces. The artists contend that such coupling offers both constraint and freedom. The human psyche is bound to its material and immaterial belongings.

Using mirrors on the surfaces of the gallery, the artists create doubles: of the work, the space, and the viewer. These elements are reflected, extended and thus further intertwined. Williams’s highly texturized and twisted figurative ceramic sculptures when placed on mirrors, have no clear beginning or end. McClay’s projected video reflects and refracts off the mirrors and onto the sculptures, blurring the lines between the work. The reflective material binds the viewer to the work, the space to the light, and the objects to themselves. Through the coupling inherent to reflection, the artists investigate the relationship between one’s identity, experiences, and possessions while exposing the complex and unsettling nature of dependency.

Chasity Williams was born in North Carolina but resided in Tampa, FL for most of her life. While simultaneously established in and slightly detached from reality, her recent work examines and celebrates a variety of themes including excess, self-reflection, codependency, death and everyday life. Williams earned her BFA at the University of South Florida in 2016. She was a member of the all women’s art collective, Cunst Haus (Tampa, FL) in 2016 as well as an organizer and member of Quaid Gallery (Tampa, FL) in 2017. She is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Georgia. She has exhibited at multiple venues including the Day and Night Projects (Atlanta, GA), Atlantic Center for the Arts, (New Smyrna Beach, FL) and the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, FL).

Alex McClay is a third year graduate student in Studio Art at the University of Georgia. She received her BFA in Photography and Sculpture from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio in 2014. She was a Core Fellow at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina from 2016-2018, where she studied printmaking, book arts and papermaking.  Her current practice engages language, movement, and the body to question and disrupt the power dynamics present in our most intimate and vulnerable spaces.  Her work has been included in multiple exhibitions and venues across the United States, including Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), ArtSpace (Raleigh, NC), Haggerty Gallery (Dallas TX), Robert C Williams Museum of Papermaking (Atlanta, GA), and Marcia Wood Gallery (Atlanta, GA).