Monet Clark: California Girl-A Retrospective Debut

Monet Clark: California Girl—A Retrospective Debut features two decades of performance/video by Clark in her first solo exhibition. Clark’s subjects often reference ways in which women are represented in media, culture and especially California subculture.

The retrospective features two videos made in the early 1990s when Clark was newly graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, in which Clark, as both director and performer exposes herself in ways ostensibly meant to engage the (male) gaze. Yet in each of them there is a built-in revulsion, and the expectation of a purely sensual, one-sided show is soon thwarted.

Simultaneously charming and repellent, personal and political, feminist and feminine, ironic and real, sacred and mundane, these works embody a host of contrasts that together provide an iconographic video portrait of 21st-century California culture and this one-of-a-kind California Girl.