Clare Strand introduces her two newest bodies of work – Skirts and 10 Least Most Wanted – alongside earlier series, selected from the artist’s extensive oeuvre, such as Unseen Agents, Conjurations, Gone Astray Details and The Betterment Room. Strand’s work is on display at Brancolini Grimaldi gallery until 2 July. This is Strand’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Clare Strand is an image maker whose work doesn’t adhere to any particular genre. She begins by researching a subject, which arises from her own life experiences, and her knowledge of the history of photography. She then works out a method which is most suited to each specific theme.

There are no references to reality in her work even though her methodology involves drawing upon the everyday utilitarian use of photography – where aesthetic issues are secondary. Since childhood, Strand has been fascinated by crime stories and paranormal that have remained central to her work. These stories have helped create a highly original, humorous and cryptic visual language that plays with her attraction to illusion and trickery, which she considers part of the photographic medium itself.

Since 2001 Clare Strand has produced a series of distinctive projects that Brancolini Grimaldi, in collaboration with curator Paul Wombell, present in a organic and consistent visual narrative that focuses both on her photographic and video work.

Sleight most notably showcases two of Strand’s most recent bodies of work: 10 Least Most Wanted and Skirts. The first features ten of the artist’s favourite cuttings from her scrapbooks, encased in clear acrylic and displayed in the reverse, then tilted at an 8 degree angle, in a bespoke cabinet. In a “perverse act” Strand chooses to show the other side of the images selected but makes both faces appear to be visible to the viewer who however can only glimpse the opposite face – the ten most wanted.

Skirts, the same way, plays with the concept of revelation and concealment and celebrates the absurdity of social and photographic conventions. Strand presents a series of ten mysterious and intriguing portraits of empty tables dressed with pleated tablecloths alluding to presence-through-absence, visible-and-hidden, further developing the theme central to her work.

Elisa Badii

Brancolini Grimaldi
43-44 Albemarle Street
W1S 4JJ London
27 May-2 July 2011
Monday-Friday 10.00am-7.00 pm
Saturday 10.00am-5.00pm