Stone House Art Gallery is pleased to present its most recent collaborative exhibition, Spawning Point: a two person show by Clare Gatto and Kara Gut. The two artists worked remotely in their respective cities of Detroit (Gatto) and Cleveland (Gut) to manifest this hybrid sculptural and digital installation. Spawning Point consists of several sculptural floor works by Kara Gut, and two suspended digitally printed chiffon works by Clare Gatto. Additionally, the artists separately created a video embedded in Gut’s sculpture, and a new sculptural form that was completed on-site, combining the two’s thematic concepts.
Spawning Point considers the concept of the “spawn point,” or starting point in a video game, while also taking in its original and primordial definition in relation to human existential creation and birth. The artists combine sculptural forms and printed chiffon under a warm dawn light, emblematic of a birth or emergence. In daylight, the gallery exists in the ambiguity between sunrise and sunset, with the only indication of time being the changing light patterns cast onto sculptural forms. Subtle differences in peachy shades of orange are transformed by glowing hot pink light alterations that turn the space into a blushing viscera upon nightfall. The “Realistic Rocks” created by Kara Gut become reminiscent of martian landscapes, while referencing both the physical and digital artificiality of man-made and pseudo-natural land accessories. The largest of these forms, “Compression,” features a looping collaborative video combining footage by Gatto taken in Iceland and an appropriated photo animation by Gut of a sirene waterfall. “Boundary Break 1 & 2” by Clare Gatto hangs freely above these forms to create lucid alterations of experiential perception, that suggest viscerally ambiguous new life forms. Together, the works created both in and for collaboration in Spawning Point toe the parameters of internal versus external, organic versus artificial, and birth versus rebirth.
Further expanding the viewer and user experience, the artists have created a 3D scan of the space and individual works that will exist online. This way, Spawning Point can dually be viewed as it was thoughtfully conceived, both IRL and online.
Spawning Point is available for viewing IRL by appointment only through the end of March 2021. To make a viewing appointment, please email stonehouseartgallery@gmail.com.
Kara Gut’s work investigates the new shape of human intimacy formed by internet lifestyle, constructed detachment from reality, and the power dynamics of the virtual. Using image and screen-based media, the work often questions ownership of digital spaces and how they mirror or perpetuate oppressive systems. Employing tropes of absurdist humor mixed with existential dread, the work pokes at the underpinnings of internet culture by appropriating the subgenres of the post-digital patriarchal industrial complex.
Clare Gatto constructs sculptures, videos, and images depicting speculative life in an attempt to dismantle the gender binary. Utilizing photo-based 3D scanning, they augment scans of their own body to create simulations of new life forms. The new bodies they devise is not an apology for a current form, but rather a chance to consider the state of becoming.
Gut & Gatto are image-based digital artists who have studied together in both undergraduate and graduate programs. They have collaborated and shown work side-by-side over the past ten years. Their collaboration experiments with physical, sculptural forms that function as artifacts of their digital work. Together they create installations that combine virtual world-building, myth-building, and physical sculptures.
