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STrAY in Four Parts: Suzanne McClelland is a limited-edition artist’s book published by David Krut Projects, New York, where McClelland’s exhibition STrAY is currently on view. STrAY, Stay, Back Then Over There, and a short essay by Kate McCrickard are presented in a handmade, Amalfi-paper envelope. Each book is signed by the artist in an edition of 200. Layout and design are by Kate McCrickard and Laura Gencarella.

This book is a collection of photographs taken by the artist of the drawings included in her exhibition. The photos have all been shot using natural light in the southeast corner of her studio. Each spread of pages becomes a composition in its own right and is an interpretation of the twelve poems by George Garret included in Stay. These poems are anecdotes and fragments lifted from letters written by two men on either side of the American civil war.

Suzanne McClelland’s newest project isolates language that exists in situations of conflict both internal and external, intimate and explosive, and presents an installation of messages in a range of materials. Paper, in the form of printed matter, photographs and drawings, forms the bulk of the exhibition…. Video and painting are utilized in collaborative works.

As someone who grew up with pervasive media images of the combat during the Vietnam War, McClelland is conscious of the disjunction between American life and the ways that conflicts taking place around the world are revealed and mediated. Forms used to describe internal division, schisms and separation resonate throughout this exhibition. ¬

Drawing on a previous work, this current exhibition explores interior space and found language. McClelland’s 1992 painted installation “right” at the Whitney Museum Phillip Morris (now Altria) was made from building materials and house paint. It was a deconstruction of a room and of the word “right”. In this current exhibition the weight of the room is dissolved and distilled to a bulletin board and then used to create a structure for reading.

The poet George Garrett provided a collection of works, Found Poems from a Lost Time, for the artist to respond to. These poems are anecdotes and fragments lifted from letters written by two men on either side of the American Civil War: Toomer Porter, an Episcopal minister and chaplain in the Confederate army, and Colonel Oliver Hazard Palmer, a lawyer who became the commanding officer of the 108th New York Volunteers. Garrett writes in the first person, rereading conflict through the prism of elapsed time.

McClelland distances these texts even further, rewriting the poems of the letters and producing thirteen visual portfolios drawn directly from each of the twelve poems plus a title portfolio. She lifts language from the poems to assemble the portfolios. The camera is used as another device to frame and warily record the material. Words reverberate with poignancy: perpetuate and maintain, short rations, Advance, shot away, doomed, left behind, sermon, vain regrets, mistake, shed. Cropping and cutting-out add a sense of removal and obfuscation, illegibility. Cast light falls across forms, picking out the fragility of the paper edges. A range of black surfaces forms the ground, where letters rise up in white paint like tombstones, or fade into the darkness, drawn in delicate crayon. The language of the poems is claustrophobic and intimate despite the violent subject, and McClelland captures this by returning to a silent southeastern corner of a nineteenth-century house. All the photographs were shot in this corner, tracking the sunlight as it moves across the wall throughout the day.

The exhibition includes two video works driven by sound. TEAR, made with Garrett Bradley, splices together real shots of South African elephants with soft shots of the cartoon elephants Dumbo and his mother. RELOAD, made with Kari Gray, shows us the vocabulary of a five-year-old boy who, when asked a question about tools for healing, digresses into a list of weapons fit for a well-stocked arsenal, revealing the surprising presence of abstract thought in the mind of a young child and showing the relationship between speech and action. Included in this body of work is a velvet painting, SOFT PARTITION, made with Drew Vogelman; MAINTAIN/PERPETUATE, a silkscreen on velour; and a pair of etchings STRAY/STAY made in South Africa. A limited-edition book, published by David Krut Projects and designed by Laura Gencarella and Kate McCrickard, accompanies the exhibition.

Keywords: Art Gallery, Artist-book, Artists, Arts-and-Culture, Artworks, David-Krut-Publications, New York