Clare Strand

A Boring Grey Jumper and An Over complicated Top.

22nd Sept- 2nd October 2022.

A visual conversation between Clare Strand and Steffi Klenz .

Filet Gallery London.

In 2020 Clare Strand and Steffi Klenz met at a Private view. Strand commented on Klenz’s over complicated top and in response, Klenz remarked on Strand’s boring grey jumper.

One year later Klenz was asked by Chapters (a web-based organisation that encourages artists to collaborate) to select someone to engage with her in written dialogue. Klenz asked Strand.

The conversation began and, after a year of back-and-forth emails, Klenz and Strand decided that the lengthy, occasionally over complicated and, at times, boring result was of little practical use… but had some ornament potential.

The seven posters are the result of Klenz and Strand’s year-long exchange. Their words input and gobbled up by a number of web programmes - those that can detect, change, mutate, interpret and output reorganised data. From software designed to identify profanity or collate punctuation to programmes that examine percentages of nouns, verbs and adjectives used in a given text.

The video work offers yet another version of the discussion, which explores the essence of communication; Manet’s and Charles Ephrussi’s exchange over a bunch of asparagus and the tribulations of Rattlesnake Kate, amongst a plethora of other weird and wonderful events that Klenz and Strand were minded to toss into the conversation. Swinging from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.