Seth Clark 'Wanderer 15' Print Available

Artist: Seth Clark
Title: Wanderer 15
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 28 x 28 Inches
Edition: 15
Price: $325

 

Seth Clark (b. 1986, Seekonk, MA) turns rot and rain soaked trash into architectonic elegies. A BFA in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design taught him to respect kerning; Pittsburgh’s 2008 housing crash taught him to respect collapse. He begins each piece on littered walks: warped shingles, wallpaper flakes and soaked lottery tickets become the first strata of large wood panels that he builds like shaky houses, stapling, gluing and sometimes torching layers until sagging rooflines and yawning windows emerge. Charcoal, pastel and acrylic follow, but never hide the original scuffs Clark calls them “the neighbourhood’s handwriting".

The shift from flat collage to fractured sculpture felt inevitable: tiny paper strips translated directly into splintered lath, and pedestals now buckle open to reveal internal studs, questioning the white cube’s own mortality . Awards piled up Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Emerging Artist of the Year 2015, Best in Show at Three Rivers Arts Festival, residencies at the Children’s Museum and the Chautauqua Institution yet he still takes a sledgehammer to finished work if it feels “too polite,” preferring the moment when control surrenders to physics.

Recent exhibitions like Passing Through at Paradigm Gallery add playful limbs to his derelict forms, a response to new fatherhood that nods toward hope inside entropy. Whether rendering Johnstown Flood ruins or a buckling row house he spotted on Instagram, Clark’s goal is not nostalgia but presence: to remind viewers that every structure, including the self, is mid-collapse and therefore alive.