Basic Info
Name: Claire Corey
Country of Origin: US
Website: http://www.clairecorey.com/
Gallery Representation: Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer
Description
Claire Ellen Corey’s work uses photographic images, painterly swipes, and collage of various mediums both directly painted or scanned and printed, then manipulated in the computer. She then paints, rescans and collages. The images are then printed out and reworked with oil, colored pencils and various mediums. These newly created worked-upon images are, in turn, scanned again. The process repeats itself, democratically incorporating “mistakes” made by the computer, error patterns from memory overload, and marks made by the artist. Every step of the process—the printer’s struggles, the painting process, and the computer errors—are reflected in the final work. The result is a hard-to-define image, both familiar and uncertain, originally using images from nature (mostly unrecognizable in the final) which not only reflect the hybrid nature of our currently changing heated environment, but new and old technologies in painting with great richness, texture and depth.
One recurring image in Corey’s work from the past three years is the jellyfish. The jellyfish for Corey represents both our potential immortality and certain death. The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is currently being studied by the scientist Shin Kubota to see if humans can learn to regenerate as this jellyfish does. The rejuvenation of the jellyfish is caused by environmental stress thus this jellyfish has been rapidly proliferating throughout the world’s oceans. It is theorized that the “blooms” and increase in all jellyfish in the ocean may be caused by climate change and the rise in water temperature. Ultimately the fear is that at some point the only living species in the ocean may be the jellyfish. One can see an analogy in our own proliferation to the detriment of other species.
Corey is a pioneer in using graphic design software in unexpected ways to create lush paintings, challenging what was and is expected of work made using a combination of traditional and digital tools; more recently highlighting nature, disturbed.
Claire Ellen Corey has been the recipient of numerous awards including The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Computer Arts, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s Trustee’s Award for an Emerging Artist,
a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program grant. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Forum and The New York Times among others. She has shown nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Plains Art Museum in North Dakota, Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer in Düsseldorf, Germany, various galleries in New York City and many more.
You can see more about her process, and the imagery from which it derives here:
https://clairecorey.com/process
Corey lives and works in Brooklyn.
