BUNNY GIRL

Monet Clark is a performance/video artist based in the SF Bay Area. Her works are raw, yet refined, wickedly humorous, political, feminist and semi-autobiographical. She depicts women in media and subculture, exploring sexual stereotypes, dichotomy, ritual and transmutation. She also works in the mediums of photography, live performance, video, installation, drawings, music and more.

Monet began photographing in grade school making still lifes and portraits of her peers. Her formal study of photography, including silver gelatin printing, began in high school. She won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1990 for her series of nude photographic portraits of her pregnant punk friends. Already a junior at San Francisco State University, majoring in Liberal Arts with a focus on Women's Studies and minoring in Holistic Theory, she transferred to SFAI in 1991. That same year, her photographs were published twice in the groundbreaking magazine On Our Backs. Monet began the graduate program at SFAI's Performance/ Video department in 1992 and officially received her BFA in photography in 1993. Through 1995 her video works were exhibited internationally.

Monet's exhibitions and graduate studies came to a halt when she became life threateningly ill from a toxic exposure which lead to an neuro-immune illness. She continued to make art through the experience, framing her personal events as performances pointing towards global issues. After over a decade of rigorous training in the healing arts she accomplished her recovery enough to resume exhibitions.

This has included screenings for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's, Now Playing Series in 2010; San Francisco Cinematheque in 2011 for Berkeley Art Museum’s book Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000; and Chicago’s International Performance Art Festival, Rapid Pulse in 2012; and a solo show at Krowswork Gallery in Oakland, titled California Girl, A Retrospective Debut, in 2011. She co-wrote and performed vocals for 4 tracks on legendary Psychedelic-Punk band Chrome’s 2014’s release Feel It Like A Scientist, to prodigious critical acclaim, as well as designed the album cover. She completed a 3 woman residency and exhibition, at Krowswork Gallery in Oakland in 2016. There she finished and screened her performance/ video movie Bunny Girl, which in 2016 also screened internationally.

Monet is currently working on 2 new performance/video ritual pieces, both interactive installations. The first is a multi-channel 11 monitor collaboration with media art pioneer John Sanborn, called NOW. It will be unveiled in the spring of 2018, at SF Camerawork in San Francisco, CA. In it Monet humorously plays two opposing characters set in sweeping natural landscapes, who guide the audience ritually through steps for transmutation. The second explores internalized misogyny, with Monet playing 3 female archetypes which will be installed as large projections. More TBA.

For more info: www.monetclark@mac.com