Commonwealth and Council

G.L.O.W. Match Three

Kelly Cline and Brenna Youngblood

Images

Commonwealth & Council continues its season of G.L.O.W. exhibitions with Match Three. This series of artist match-ups pays homage to GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling while expanding on the trademarked acronym with possibilities for other meanings in the midst of our shifting realities and narratives of difference. As a code of conduct, our G.L.O.W. encourages teamwork and positions its participants as co-conspirators rather than adversaries.


Match Three teams up Kelly Cline and Brenna Youngblood in the exhibition, Gathering Lots of Wood. This permutation of the acronym exemplifies the curatorial framework of G.L.O.W. by connoting an action that rebuilds a community through shared responsibility. Utilizing physical, textual, and symbolic stratagems, Cline and Youngblood dismantle shoddy infrastructures of knowledge and social order by regenerating an open system for collectivity.


Kelly Cline uses a cyclical process of construction and deconstruction to create seemingly fragile pieces. In understanding that human growth occurs through a reoccurring pattern of trauma and healing, Cline sees these pieces as metaphors for her body. The repetition of cutting apart and putting back together again, along with kerf (the material that is lost when you cut something), causes her sculptures to warp and shift form. Her recent work adopts sculptural methods to create painterly objects with surfaces that change as they are viewed from all sides. 


Stemming from her archive of personal documents and materials, Brenna Youngblood restructures dominant paradigms of power and tropes of the American Dream. By interposing autobiography and subjectivity, Youngblood reconstructs a narrative of difference that multiply our shifting realities. Her sculpture, Fall 1977 - Spring 2005 and body of paintings, Mega Diamond, incorporate faux wood paneled walls from her childhood home that transform into symbolic diamonds that are marked by race and class.


Kelly Cline received her BFA from Penn State University and her MFA from CalArts in 2010. She has been included in exhibitions at The Comapany, Gallery Spatium, Statler Waldorf, The Santa Barbara Art Forum, and Acme Gallery. Her work was recenlty written about in Artillery Queered. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.


Brenna Youngblood received her BFA from Cal State Long Beach and MFA from UCLA. Her current solo show, The Mathematics of Individual Achievement, is on view at Honor Fraser Gallery until December 17th.