June 5 - July 12
Clay From the Clay Pit:
Mariana Garibay Raeke, Molly Miller, Allison Plastridge
Opening reception: June 5, 6-8 pm
Still from Molly Miller, An Immaculate Conception, 2025; 7 minutes 31 seconds; single channel video with sound
GUEST is proud to present Clay From the Clay Pit, a three-person exhibition featuring works by Mariana Garibay Raeke, Molly Miller, and Allison Plastridge. Working at distinct phases of their careers, each of these artists engage with what the early 20th century French historian Henri Focillon called “the work of metamorphosis.”
Allison Plastridge’s paintings enact the slippage of bodily sensation and travel into record and back again; Molly Miller bleeds one material and medium into another, building transparencies and opacities that reflect time’s porousness; the past - manifested in the movement of bodily forms - flicker just as Mariana Garibay Raeke begins to draw, making dance partners between her earlier forms and the vanishing present.
A passage from Focillon’s lyrical 1934 book of art history and analysis, The Life of Forms in Art, lends the show its title. “The wood of the statue is no longer the wood of the tree,” he writes, deploying a straightforwardness - obviousness, even - that still retains the mystery inherent to creation. “Bricks that have been baked and then built into a wall bear no relation to the clay of the clay pit… artistic activity, like a chemical reaction, elaborates matter even as it continues the work of metamorphosis.” The works of this exhibition find the artists in the midst of that chemical reaction: making studies for larger paintings; working provisionally or in transit, with found and at-hand materials; or reaching back toward earlier works, and at a past that has already changed.
Born in New England, Allison Plastridge spent the last two decades living and traveling in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The substrates of Attention is the purest form of love (2024) and Hanging sardines (2001), painted more than 20 years apart, are taken from materials the artist collected during her travels, affixed to canvas. Grace Fills Empty Spaces (2025) demonstrates the physicality and urgency with which she paints, and how her interest centers less on image - whether the painting is abstract or observed - and more on giving life to the sudden spark that has captured her attention. Giving an example of what her vision fixates on, Plastridge writes, “the iridescent skin or glistening eye [of a fish]; an unusual color, shape, or texture.” Speaking to a practice built around intermittent travel, sheets of the artist’s recently used palette papers are scattered beneath her work on the gallery floor.
Videos by Molly Miller permit the viewer a particular intimacy: a view into the uncertain, fallible, human processes of creation. In Cloud Gospel or JC Retell, the artist repeatedly tries to remember a story she wrote years earlier. Each time she recounts the narrative, she finds new details or modifies others; found footage taken from films loosely dramatizes this shifting story. Immaculate Conception is an even more personal reflection on acts of formation - sometimes magical, sometimes absurd and mundane. As her girlfriend prepares to have her eggs frozen, the artist records the pair’s conversations. The movement of time runs as a throughline in her works in diverse media; an oil painting situated near the monitors on which her videos play is a layered attempt to capture the changing light and shadow of a chair against a window.
Drawing is a vital but seldom exhibited aspect of Mariana Garibay Raeke’s practice. She presents a series of watercolor drawings on paper made during her residency in Oaxaca this year, Untitled (from - body), works made in the quiet of early morning and the tired respite of night. Rooted in a personal poetry of the body’s relation to time, these works show the artist searching for and restaging bodily gestures, movements, and travel. “To draw is to lay out time,” she writes. “I draw with my whole body/pulling out what is unformed… to draw is to leave yourself behind.”
Clay From the Clay Pit is on view through July 12.