Stacks on Stacks | LAMAR DODD SCHOOL OF ART

Stacks on Stacks presents the work of three artists from the Carolinas working in abstraction–Mark Brosseau, Martha Clippinger, and Susan Klein. The artists explore the relationships of shape and color through various media including painting, ceramics, wood, and textiles. Together, their investigations of hue, line, and form stack against each other, generating a rhythm that echoes throughout the gallery.

Imbued with curiosity, the work plays between order and intuition. As Brosseau says, “I was drawn to the kinds of questions whose answers were another set of questions, not a solution to a problem.” The forms that emerge hold an evocative yet strange familiarity. Clippinger’s textiles and wood reliefs skew the repetition of their geometric construction. Orchid purple and tangerine stripes zip in imperfect alignment on a chartreuse ground. Fuschia weaving cascades over stepped cobalt and earthy brown.

Klein’s ceramics also take up this rhythmic density. They stack together, patterned with zigzags, stripes, checkerboard, and triangles. The objects form new compositions through relationships of physical precarity. A vessel sprouts tenuous arms; a ritualistic pile leans off-center. The impression of destabilizing structures comes through again in Brosseau’s black and white paintings. Behind the angular lines, gray haze suggests erasure, giving an impression of moving through ephemeral moments. The solutions are shifting, responsive, and accumulated. As in memory and making, each instance builds upon the last. This exhibition is curated by Dodd Galleries Graduate Student Assistant, Katie Ford.

Artist Bios:

Susan Klein is an artist and curator living in Charleston, SC. She has shown her work nationally and internationally including recent exhibitions at Day and Night Projects in Atlanta, University of Southern Maine, and inclusion in the 2021 South Carolina Biennial. Klein is a 2020-2021 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Other awards include a Hambidge Center Residency, Wassaic Project Residency (NY) and residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn), a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, an Ox-bow Artist-in-Residence Summer Fellowship, an Otis College of Art and Design Summer Residency, residency at Arteles Creative Research Center (Finland), and residency at Takt (Berlin). Klein received her MFA in 2004 from University of Oregon, a BFA in 2001 from University of New Hampshire, and studied art at NYU from 1997-99. She is an Associate Professor of Art at College of Charleston and is co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville, an artist-run gallery.

Martha Clippinger (b. 1983, Columbus, Georgia) received her BA from Fordham University and her MFA from Rutgers University. Recent solo exhibitions include Textiles and Objects, Elizabeth Harris Gallery; Vibrating Boundaries, Warren Wilson College; Translations, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens; Two Sides/ Dos Lados, Institute 193; Off-Kilter, Hodges Taylor; Hodge Podge Lodge, The Columbus Museum; Colorplay, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, and Architectural Digest. Clippinger is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a 2018 Arts/Industry at Kohler Co., 2017 Durham Arts Council Grant in Craft, 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, and 2013 Fulbright-Garcia Robles research grant completed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has been a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. Her work is in public collections, including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Duke University, and The Columbus Museum. Clippinger is represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York and Hodges Taylor in Charlotte. She lives and works in Durham, North Carolina.

Equally drawn to color, science, math, and emotion, Mark Brosseau discovered art by way of chemistry and architecture. After graduating from high school in Lyndon, VT, where he was born in 1976, he entered Dartmouth College with the intention of pursuing studies in chemistry. His interest soon shifted to architecture, a curriculum that required a drawing class. That drawing class changed not only his college major but also his life, introducing him to the world of creative exploration that fuels his passion and intellectual curiosity today. Mark graduated with honors from Dartmouth in 1998 and then earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. He followed that with a year of painting and printmaking in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. He has had fourteen solo exhibitions, the most recent being Far-fetched at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, KS in February 2020. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including New American Paintings, and reviewed by ArtForum, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Two Coats of Paint, the Artblog, and others. Mark currently lives with his wife and two dogs in Greer, SC. He is one of the founding members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville and is a 2019 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

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