Surface and Illusion: Recent Works by Debra Clem
Carnegie Center for Art & History
October 28, 2021 - January 15, 2022
The following text was written by Julie Leidner for the Debra Clem: Surface & Illusion exhibition catalog at the Carnegie Center for Art & History.
Debra Clem: Surface and Illusion is a solo exhibition by the Indiana-native painter and Head of Painting at Indiana University Southeast, featuring eighteen paintings and pastels of her perceived environment, created over the better part of a decade.
Surface and Illusion underscores that a painting can be two objects at once. It is a physical thing covered in paint and hanging on a wall, and it is a representation--an artist’s attempt to create an illusion of something else, like a still life, landscape, or portrait. This doubleness is part of painting’s lasting allure.
What can you tell about a person just by looking at them?
And what can you tell about an artist by the way they look at people?
Seven of the paintings are never-before-exhibited portraits painted in the past three years, rendered with a traditional oil technique in exquisite detail on circular aluminum panels. The artist’s choice of models in these portraits underscores her passion for her craft. The vast majority of people depicted in Surface and Illusion are also art educators--many of them her colleagues in the art program at IU Southeast. These individuals are more than just the people that Debra Clem encounters at her place of work each day: they are people that have also chosen to devote their lives to analyzing the visual world. For these portrait subjects, the act of looking is central to their vocation.
The exhibition traces the artist’s footsteps through her own personal act of looking, as she approaches an array of visually complex subjects to tackle: towering junkyard cars, deer in motion, digitally morphing textures, feathery palms, and cascades of folding patterns. The surfaces of these paintings range from whisper-smooth to thickly-textured. The smooth circular portraits, like Barbara Kutis, resemble portals into the private world of the sitters. The monumental painting K120 (90” x 84”), depicting a stack of compacted cars at River City Metal scrap yard, is made with a textured impasto technique.
Like arguably all of the works in the exhibition, K120 is representational, allowing viewers to look beyond the painting’s physical surface and focus on the depiction of the cars. Step close to K120 to see the artist’s brushstrokes, then stand back to feel the presence of the towering cars. Across the galleries, the paintings GRE and Boxsprings (both 48” x 48”) also depict items at the scrap yard, but here, the artist’s choice to zoom in at close-range makes the images appear abstract. Paintings like GRE demand that we look at the juicy surface of the paintings, even more so than the junkyard tangles that they depict. These different ways of looking are key to the genre’s continuing, multi-layered intrigue.
Debra Clem has exhibited in more than sixty group, invitational, and solo shows at the regional and national level since 1995. She has been the recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as five individual grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. In addition, Debra has received many internal fellowships and grants from IU Southeast, where she is a full professor, heading the painting area in the fine arts program. She received the Museum Guild Purchase Award at the 55th Mid-States juried exhibition at the Evansville Museum in 2010 and has received residency fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Clem was awarded the Distinguished Research and Creativity Award for senior faculty at IU Southeast in 2006. She was a graduate assistant at the Pennsylvania State University where she received her MFA degree in painting. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky and is the author of The Painting Guide.
Clem has exhibited in more than sixty group, invitational, and solo shows at the regional and national level since 1995. She has been the recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as five individual grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
In addition, Debra has received many internal fellowships and grants from IU Southeast, where she is a full professor, heading the painting area in the fine arts program.
She received the Museum Guild Purchase Award at the 55th Mid-States juried exhibition at the Evansville Museum in 2010 and has received residency fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Clem was awarded the Distinguished Research and Creativity Award for senior faculty at IU Southeast in 2006. She was a graduate assistant at the Pennsylvania State University where she received her MFA degree in painting. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky and is the author of The Painting Guide.
