Through forming body, Off works to keep us aware of our own.
What becomes tangible through their clay figuring is a prompt to consider our own life of shape and shaping.
Like a rutting path, Off refuses to erase the marks which make a landscape. For it is in the cracks, the tracks, the pinches and piles that we have the opportunity to feel what happened before we arrived in this moment.
Their work inverts design principles which tell the maker to make experience imperceptible - to steal sense from weight, angle, texture, touch.
Today, to be done well is to have taken away, smoothed out, and smoothed over effort. What’s done well grants ease, gifting a moment you won’t even notice.
In smoothing out the traces of formation, it becomes all too easy to forget the relationships which brought about a body. And too, to forget that relationships continue to form and sustain a body.
So Off patiently wanders off the paved path, unfurling the land below the bridge of the highway. Replanting what will keep us company along the way. Asking us to re-member ourselves through our bodies among others.
It might not be readily apparent what impressions have passed through and may linger on the human body. But knowing that there is a lingering, Off works to keep the visible from becoming invisible. In each clay figuring, we see the effect that touch can have on a body.
The figures serve as embodied record of the dynamics which shape us. They stand to say that information cannot be defined statically.
For we are all only ever in formation.
We have all been touched, carved, eroded, built, carried, pushed, pulled, formed.
The movement and moments that have passed through us - that we have passed through - have much to say.
Hallie Elodie Off
Mendocino Arts Center
Final Exhibition April/May 2024
Chosen works remain on display through 2025
>> The work in this exhibition posits growing an appreciation for desaturation, in all forms, will result in an increased capacity to process the overly saturated information we come into contact with. <<