Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016

Laurie Beth Clark Professor UW–Madison Department of Art, since 1985 Video, Performance, Installation,Visual Culture Studies, Relational Aesthetics 1983 Master of Fine Arts, Rutgers University 1981 Master of Arts, University of New Mexico 1976 Bachelor of Arts, Hampshire College Recent achievements 2015 Foodways Darmstadt, KunstTREFFpunkt und Internationalen Waldkunst Zentrum, Darmstadt, Germany White ForeignerWalking Tours: 2015 Xenos (ξένος), Athens, Greece 2014 Chinkewah, Lhasa, Tibet 2014 Lao Wei (老外), Great Wall, China 2014 Extranjero (Yanqui), Tijuana, Mexico 2014 Extranjero (Yanqui), Lima, Peru 2014 Foreigner, London 2014 Cooking With: Xin Wang, The Gallery, West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, China 2014 Ossuary, Herron Galleries, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis 2014 Progressive Dinner: Problem Solving Social Practice in Art, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA Artist’s statement In 2008, I began a series of “walking tours” to take up questions of outsider status or foreignness. I wear “surgical” masks of camouflage fabrics and take walks in unfamiliar locations outside of the United States. Over the last seven years, I have performed walks in Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Croatia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Laos, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, the Netherlands, Peru, 14 Quadrennial 2016 | Faculty Poland, Portugal, Rwanda, South Africa, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tibet, and Uruguay. Fabric masks, which I originally saw in Vietnam being worn by people on mopeds and motorbikes, are dysfunctional barriers, as the fabric provides neither medical nor environmental protection. Arguably, they are more effective as signifiers, which leave open the question of whether the mask is meant to protect the wearer from the environment or the environment from the wearer. I was curious about how one chooses to figure one’s own identity as a visual representative of a group that may have been historically aligned with colonization, but other important themes in the work, especially as I have walked in Europe and North America, are (im) migration and (dis)location. I use camouflage fabrics to draw attention to the (im)possibility and/ or the (un)desirability of blending in with a dominant culture. But as I have performed the work in different countries, the referents of the masks have changed, influenced by both context (guerillas in Colombia) and timing (SARS in Argentina). After each walk, I try to embroider one mask with the (often pejorative) term for (white) foreigners, words like angrez, baraig, bule, farang, gaigin, gringo, gweilo, haole, mzungo, obruni. Work in the show Laurie Beth Clark (American, b. 1956) Lao Wei (老外), 2014, performance documentation, 103 x 58 ½ in. Etranger, 2011, performance documentation, 41 ⅜ x 31 ⅜ in. Chile, 2012, performance documentation, 28 x 44 in.

Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016 | Page 30