Claire Pentecost

Exhibition: Interior Studies

Dates: 11.04.2010 – 12.11.2010

Opening: 11.04.2010, 6-8pm

Higher Pictures presents Interior Studies by Chicago-based artist, advocate and
educator Claire Pentecost. The series of site-specific drawings re-presented as
photographs describes an interior space, the physical and mental process of collection,
consideration and organization of information. The exhibition features over fifteen
Palladium prints created from 1999 to the present.

For a while I rented a small, somewhat derelict apartment to use as a studio. There I
developed a practice in which I draw on the walls, stopping at various points to make
an 8 X 10 negative of the drawing, often incorporating various collaged objects or
appropriated images. The process is continuous, moved forward through constant
revision. The extracted photographic records are treated as finished. Imagery
appears, disappears and reappears. The “real” or original drawing has come and
gone on a wall in a run-down apartment somewhere.

On some level, this work is about my sense of how difficult it is to place my cultivated
modernist interiority in a postmodern world. Our model for the self is shifting from a
depth paradigm to a celebration of surfaces. I draw on surfaces. I seek to deliver a
steady stream of attempts at coherence, based on the constant influx of variably
filtered stimulation.   -Claire Pentecost

Pentecost is currently the Associate Professor of Photography at the Art Institute of
Chicago. She received her BA in 1980 from Smith College and her MFA in 1988 from
Pratt Institute. Pentecost completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1989.
Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that
organize divisions of knowledge, focusing on nature, artificiality and food systems.
Pentecost has exhibited at the Drawing Center, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art,
NY, American Fine Art Gallery, NY, Corcoran Museum, Washington, D.C., Transmediale
05, Berlin. Since 2006, she has worked with Brian Holmes and 16Beaver, organizing a
series of seminars in New York and Zagreb. Recently, Pentecost was a keynote speaker
during the Creative Time Summit at Cooper Union, NY, October 2010.

For press inquiries please contact Kim Bourus at 212-249-6100.