ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Rachel Clark

@uselessgutfeeling

Rachel Clark is a graduate of Maine College of Art and Design whose work focuses on the erotic pleasures of perception and revels in the physicality of paint. Rachel also holds a BFA in painting/printmaking from the University of Connecticut and a Post-Baccalaureate teaching certificate from Central Connecticut State University. Their work has received numerous awards and recognitions and has been shown throughout the Northeast, including venues such as the Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Crafts Center in Maryland, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, and a solo show, Same Time, Same Place, in Stafford Springs, CT. Related projects include a zine, Useless Gut Feeling, which was included at the University of Southern Maine Book Fair and the CT Zine Fair in New Haven. Rachel lives and works in Hartford, Connecticut.

My work responds to questions about desire, pleasure, and satisfaction. I think of painting as a form of play, through which I weave my own curiosities together with what I know of art history. Through the specificity of each shape, color, and gesture, I make room for an esoteric eroticism. I pair shapes that satisfy with colors that activate each other, finding equivalents to both physical and psychological experiences of desire, pleasure, and satisfaction through the act of painting.

 

The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.