Whitney Claflin Debuts Solo Exhibition at MoMA PS1

Artist Whitney Claflin was wearing this when we met: a lace-trimmed champagne slipdress, oversized blue-striped button-down and silver clogs.

Next time, one of her paintings might be wearing pieces of that same outfit.

“So much of my work is made with things that I used to wear; my own jewelry or clothes,” says Claflin, whose first solo museum show is now on view at MoMA PS1. 

It’s still a few weeks from the opening of that show, titled “I was wearing this when you met me,” and Claflin is seated on the floral couch inside of her sunny Brooklyn apartment, where she’d recently moved from a ground floor space in the city. Her cat, a rescue by way of a cat café in the Lower East Side, lounges nearby in a sunbeam cast across the wooden floor as Claflin shares how she acquired the amalgamation of items in her living room: the secondhand couch by way of the internet, the floral chair discovered at a flea market around the corner from MoMA PS1.

The title of Claflin’s exhibition was inspired by a 1996 Calvin Klein commercial for CK Be, in which a young Kate Moss speaks conversationally to the camera about a male romantic interest objecting to her outfit choices. “It was the first time I ever heard Kate Moss speak, which was a huge deal for me, and she went from 2D to real life,” says Claflin of the iconic supermodel. Beyond the feminist resonance of the line, it also spoke to a concrete aspect of her work. 

“There’s at least one painting in the show that was a skirt that I used to wear that got a stain. So then I was like, OK, I’ll just stretch this and the unstained part can become a painting,” she says. “So there is a very literal aspect of, oh, I was wearing this when you met me — but now it’s a painting.”

Within her work, Claflin is interested in iterations: items that have been repurposed and transformed, words that are divorced from their source material and collaged.  

“Like this globe lamp, I got on eBay and it was like, I may or may not turn that into a piece. We’re going to live with it for a little bit and see if I want to or not,” she says of the shiny globe stationed underneath rows of books. “I’ll be walking around and I’ll find something on the ground and I’m like, ‘let’s just take that just in case.’ And then almost seasonally, I’ll do a big purge and be like, ‘OK, this doesn’t need to be here anymore,’” she adds. “Stuff you’ve been saving for three years that you’re like, ‘I’m never gonna use this.  It’s never gonna turn into a painting.’”

There are vestiges of Claflin’s career and lived experience throughout the space, like a handmade sign from when she sold vases on Venice Beach in California that has been repurposed as part of a sculpture. There are nods to DIY culture, including site-specific interventions like “Forget Marriage,” which she inscribed on the ceiling of a museum bathroom using soot, and nostalgic references to video game controllers and other ephemera.

A hot plate transforms into a DJ deck thanks to its “Remix” title, and a closer look at a lava lamp reveals strips of text on its base. Nearby is “Genau,” a mannequin doing a handstand which she describes as a “punctuation mark.” The definitive title translates as “exactly; precisely” in German. Although based in New York for the last 15 years, Claflin recently completed a six-month studio residency in Germany. 

Claflin, who graduated from Yale’s MFA program, has fond memories of her first visit to MoMA PS1 while an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design. The museum is her first time staging an exhibition in a space that veers from the “super white box” feel of a gallery. “I’m really excited to see what a tin ceiling and border trim on the wall and paneling does to the work.” 

Asked about the viewers’ experience, Claflin references the late landscape painter Fairfield Porter.

“His whole theory on painting is the action of looking that happens between when you’re looking at your subject and you’re putting paint on the canvas, where your mind is simultaneously holding these two things,” she says, adding that she’s interested in bringing that experience to the viewer in the form of looking between objects and paintings within an exhibition space.

“Ideas of repetition and looking and thinking, which I think is also analogous to living in a city,” she says. “Walk through the show like you’re just walking through the city. And the things you pull out of it, that’s perfect.

 ”There’s a lot of pieces that I’ll make where it’s about making the work, but it’s also [about] just being like, yes — thumbs up,” she adds. “It’s stuff that I’m like, this is cool. Please just enjoy it.”