December 9 - 23, 2004
January 4 - 22, 2005
Claude Wampler
“Pomerania”
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Claude Wampler. The exhibition titled "Pomerania" consists of a series of photographs, video, sculptures and drawings.
This show is part-homage to Cake, Claude's beloved pet Pomeranian and performance partner of thirteen years. The bittersweet twilight of a career at its natural and inevitable end often provokes nostalgia. The artist's work is revived, while the artist becomes reduced to a faint trace of herself, merely serving to fulfill the desire and memory of the spectator.
Rather than attempt to capture and domesticate the legacy of Cake, "Pomerania" examines the dynamics of control and coercion that have constituted Claude's vital working relationship with Cake for over a decade. The images and objects in the exhibition depict a relationship predicated in part on physical domination and narrated through the dramas of attachment and dependence. The stable polarities of owner and pet, captor and captive, aggressor and innocent shift under scrutiny; the center does not hold. The work thus becomes an open exploration of complex forces binding the artist to a collaborator/pet, as well as consequences of being so bound.
This is Claude's fifth solo show with Postmasters.
Over the past few years she has completed a commissioned installation and video project for the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and a new work for the theater, "Present Absence", which premiered at the Kunstenfestival des Arts in Brussels at Kaaistudios, Brussels. A solo art exhibition of her visual work was exhibited in Los Angeles at Richard Telles Fine Arts and in New York she created a window installation, Bad Job/Cruel World: Stupidity 2001, Part II, US$700 Stunt with Wedgy, for the New Museum for Contemporary Art and a performance lecture, "Richard Wampler", for The Whitney Museum of American Art. Claude was also commissioned to create the large-scale project, "Infiltration", for the Museumsquartier in Vienna. Claude mounted two exhibitions, "denislavant" in Paris at Menagerie de Verre and Song and "Dance (and a good movie)" in Lisbon at the Gulbenkian Foundation Center of Modern Art. Very recently she finished a new performance/installation, "Stable (Stupidity Project Part 10)", produced by the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts which premiered at Performance Space 122 in New York and then toured to Diverse Works in Houston and Kaaitheater in Brussels.