March 9 - April 30, 2023
By Force of Nature expands Clar’s decades-long practice of working with light- and screen-based technologies to interrogate the slippages, impositions, and mistranslations that condition life lived in a global diaspora. He incorporates industrially produced materials, animal life, and documentary technique to stage a complex narrative about the weight that identity carries both in Filipino sociality and in the diaspora’s perception of it. The works speak to the uneven translations that occur when the feats of an “individual”—a concept as ubiquitous as it is overdetermined in American culture—becomes imperfectly visible to a populous for whom such a concept is only ever determined in relation to one’s local community, region, or family.
October 15 - November 14, 2021
Praise Shadows Art Gallery is pleased to present Space Folding, the Manila-based American artist James Clar’s debut in Boston. Recognized internationally for his diverse art practice that spans digital media, light sculptures, and new technologies, the exhibition highlights his global reach by bringing to Boston artworks created at his studios in Dubai, New York, and Manila. Clar will also introduce new light works made specifically for this exhibition.
Employing a wide range of technological production processes, Clar has developed his own open-ended systems involving light and sculpture that explore the ways in which technology can alter narrative forms. What is visible and apparent at first glance is often just the surface layer of a more complex story.
Curatorial Lead: Yutong Shi
June 26 - July 24, 2016
Developed over the last year while transitioning his studio from New York to Manila, Clar’s new body of work derives its title from the communication function of digital devices wherein the real-world GPS location of the device (and the person using it) is transmitted to other programs, apps, or people. It is a way of letting your presence be known, shared, or be tracked. The works question ideas of presence, connection, and identity in a globalized world recently forced into a fifth space, where the rift between network time and solar time is ever increasing.
Working at the interstices of art and technology James Clar’s multifaceted global studio practice creates space for an abstract analysis into ideas inspired by the digital and human lived experience. Having held studios in multiple overlapping cities, which have ranged from Dubai, New York, Tokyo, and now Manila, Clar maps out alternative transcultural and transnational connections that transcend geographical borders and encourages fresh perspectives on the migration of art and ideas.
Engaging with a variety of arts media ranging from installation, performance, and sculpture, Clar has experimented with the notion of the ‘readymade ’and has explored the visual language of the sculptural form as a study into post-objecthood. This has allowed him to observe and relay the variable conditions of social and subjective spaces and explore ideas related to symbol and abstraction, the celestial and terrestrial, and history and discontinuity.
Clar’s works readily invite audience participation to explore technological innovation as a poetic tool for contemplating competing value systems. In this context his multifaceted art moves beyond the argument of “technology for technology’s sake” and “art for art’s sake,” to highlight the union of art and technology, which cannot be divorced from the contemporary practices of daily life. It allows us another way to contend with the liminal pandemic environment, polarization of truth, disparities in wealth and land, and the impact of fast speed globalization on the environment at large. These ideas operate as the basis for a new body of work that Clar created between New York and Manila during the pandemic and serve as an archive for a transitory history that cross-circulated the entire globe.
Words by Sara Raza.
"The World Never Ends", Jane Lombard, New York, 2018
Sep 6 - Oct 20, 2018
Dissociation and the fragmentation of reality through technology are the subjects of investigation in James Clar’s exhibition, The World Never Ends. Opening September 6, 2018 at Jane Lombard Gallery, Clar creates an immersive multimedia installation that embraces and opens wide the blurred boundaries of the tangible and the metaphysical. It explores the notions of reality, virtual-reality, and ponders if in our technologically intertwined world, a new form of reality is taking shape.
The central installation in the exhibition is a multi-channel video projection entitled Tibetan Book of the Dead (Chapters 1, 2, 3) (2018). In this environment the videos are distorted and mixed through an installation structure that includes elements of lights, water, and forest vegetation. The distortions in the projection mix the videos together like a visual dreamscape, or a dream of the forest. The title of the installation comes from the book of the same name describing the experiences consciousness has in the period after death and the next rebirth.
One of the videos was shot in 2017 at the fabled Aokigahara, aka Sea of Trees or Suicide Forest, in Japan near Mount Fuji. For centuries, it has been a place where people have chosen to leave society and end their lives. They come there, sometimes for weeks beforehand, to meditate and contemplate a post-physical existence. To Clar, the forest represents a realm between the real (physical) and the spiritual (metaphysical). The video is an eerie series of shots featuring a figure wandering the forest. Edited frame by frame while using Photoshop’s Content Aware filter, it becomes difficult to discern the corporeal being from the lushness of the forest. However, the limitations of the software does not create a flawless edit, resulting in an unearthly effect of a roaming specter or a ghost.
The second video in the installation investigates the intersection of documentary and narrative structure. In a series of poignant and personal interviews with some of Japan’s premier professional video game players, Clar created deliberate environments in which these interviews take place. The players were told to imagine themselves living in a future with e-sports being a long established industry. In these storylines, they have traveled to another city and are relaxing after a big match. They talk earnestly to the interviewer about the mental challenges of gaming, practicing from 2pm to 6am daily, what reality means to them, and how the videogames filter into their subconscious at night. They speak as themselves, while at the same time existing in a fictional narrative environment.
"PEACEMINUSONE: Beyond the Stage", SEMA, Seoul 2016
June 09 - Aug 23, 2016
PEACEMINUSONE is an exhibition designed to enhance people's interest in the contemporary art while inducing rich encounters of art and the pop culture through G-Dragon's collaboration with artists of home and abroad. It is another name for the world perceived of and imagined by G-Dragon as it implies the 'ONE' where the ideal and reality encounter in the PEACE-ful, utopian world and the real world with shortcomings or 'MINUS.' The exhibition presents four creative stages that propose creative communication between the pop music and visual art led with intriguing stories shared by G-Dragon and the artists.
False Awakenings: James Clar’s first solo show in New York. The exhibition will feature new works that continue the artist’s exploration of technology’s influence on our notions of perception and reality. With a background in film and animation, James Clar approaches each sculpture as an alternative visual system to television or film. Rather than relying on those set mediums and working within their physical limitations, he manipulates light and video to create new visual systems that correspond to each concept.
A "false awakening" is a vivid and convincing dream about waking from sleep, while the dreamer, in reality, continues to sleep. As the information we receive in our waking experience increasingly comes via interaction with computer systems and digital technologies, our physical reality becomes less concrete. Today’s increased prevalence of technology has significantly blurred the boundaries between waking reality, dream reality, and virtual reality; these areas of perceived consciousness have started to overlap and bleed into one another. The works in the show call attention to, and even exploit, our diminished and altered views of reality.
In Nobody’s Home (2016), a door leans against the wall and light spreads out from the crack underneath it. The viewer perceives someone walking on the other side by watching the movement of light and shadow. However, that light is actually generated by a strip of LEDs integrated into the bottom of the door, creating moving light that tricks the viewer into perceiving a space and a person that exist beyond the door. Instead, the presence of an entire person is reduced to sliver of transmitted light.
In Simulation of a Simulation (New York) (2016), Clar uses a high definition camera that is locked onto a constantly shaken snowglobe of New York City. The live image is sent to a connected television, displaying a generative animation of New York City in a snowstorm. By zooming in on a small area of the snowglobe and increasing its size significantly on the screen, Clar makes the city appear like a cartoon or computer animation. However, the tiny snowflakes moving around the snowglobe obey the laws of physics and gravity, creating a simulated, hybrid reality between the virtual and the real.
With Rain Under Lamppost (2014), a projector is mounted near the ceiling in such a way that half of the video image grazes the wall before it hits the floor. This creates a cone of light similar to the cone of light that glows from a lamppost. Using generative software, video is then sent through the projector to display a replicated image of rain falling through the cone of light. The work creates a simulation of volumetric space and hints at the split between virtual worlds and reality, while also creating a calm and reflective scene of watching rain passing through a beam of light.
Through his body of work, Clar aims to analyze visual experience, human perception, and the elusive connections between them. Technology, for Clar, is an extension and expansion of our senses, subtly transforming our perception of the world around us until we can no longer discern natural from artificial experience.
"Powers of Ten" Weisman Museum, Los Angeles, California
This mid-career retrospective brings together a selection of works from 2011 to 2024, highlighting Clar’s mastery of video and light systems to examine how technology informs our perception of the natural world. These explorations are grounded in Clar’s film background and his deep appreciation of the California Light and Space movement. The exhibition features works created during Clar’s time living in Dubai, New York, Tokyo, and his current residency in Manila, as well as work made in Los Angeles specifically for this exhibition.
