Alyssa McClenaghan is a New York based artist who works with materials typically used in construction. Mining ideas of labor, femininity, gender, and her own lived history, she enacts a labor intensive process using big box store construction materials that are transformed and re-imagined into bodily objects, straddling a space between the psychological and the domestic. In this work, bodily sculptures have lost their skeletal armature and are draped over towel bars. The action of draping the body renders it inactive offering a sense detachment, or freedom from the self. In this work, McClenaghan explores the separation of our physical form from our souls both in the finality of death, and in psychic space. Bringing the body so clearly into the work allows her to confront mortal fears, and wrestle with what it means to be a human.
McClenaghan received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College. She has shown her work throughout the U.S. and internationally with recent exhibitions at Main Street Gallery 495 ( Catskill, NY), The Rad Hourani Foundation (MTL), Hesse Flatow (Chelsea, NYC), Roundabouts Now! (Kingston, NY), Peep Space (Tarrytown, NY), and solo presentations with Paradice Palase at NADA x Foreland (Catskill, NY), Collar Works Gallery (Troy, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (Tribeca, NYC), and blah blah Gallery (Philadelphia, PA). McClenaghan’s work has been published in ArtMaze Magazine’s 20th Anniversary issue and was featured in Friend of the Artist Book: Volume 13 and she has been an artist in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA, at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, the ChaNorth Residency run through ChaShaMa, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
