The Brooklyn Rail

In the sprawling expanse of the Montserrat Gallery in Beverly, MA, Earthen Clay’s work has taken up residence. The wall pieces orient me to the sculptures and back again; the work creates a spiral space for the viewer to move through. With scarcely a place to rest, the exhibition creates a dizzying effect as visitors move through a mess of materials piled, folded, and spilling out onto the floor, reemerging in sculptural form. Messiness is a formal mechanism for Clay, as he views excess as a site of queer empowerment.

The excess of material piles up, letting the viewer know that there is so much more here than can be immediately seen. The surfaces become a glimpse—like the event horizon at the edge of a black hole.

Some older works included in the show are more descriptive, such as Slow Strip (2023), an Italian leather purse that is bent, stretched, and tied up, its innards exposed, pushing out from the inside toward the viewer. Tacked to the wall like a spatchcocked chicken, its vulnerability feels coerced rather than voluntarily offered. Clay’s materials fluctuate between found objects—golf balls, a lanternfly, a gold earring—and more traditional art materials: acrylic, gouache, silicone, and resin. The surfaces resemble bodily leakage, like a bloodstain or a wound.

Slow Strip carries a strong sense of time: the speed of making, an urgency that bypasses the conscious mind in favor of intuitive logic. I feel not just the time of the work’s making, but the time of day—this moment captured feels as though it takes place in a specific time frame, like dawn after a long night out gone astray. The work is perched on the edge of the new day, while grieving the night that led to this mess. This piece, along with others in the show, feels like part of a process of grieving—an attempt to piece back together a world that no longer makes sense.

While Slow Strip offers a tangible and somewhat comprehensible narrative, Clay leaves legibility behind in many of his more recent works. In Eyes Closed Glow (2024), the center of the piece is made from folded pillowcases. Dark and light push against each other within the creases, creating relative color relationships; the light surfaces of the multi-colored fabrics are desaturated through the pressure of the pleats. Red and black gestural paint frames the center.

Here, Clay messes with the legible art-historical mark that is typically read as expressive—but expressive of what, exactly? In an age where identity is commodified and must be rabidly explained and consumed again and again, Clay entreats the viewer to tune into the murmur of expression itself. What is the punctum, the telling detail, that creates this cry or moment of legibility?

The grooves of fabric remind us of the infinite bends of the multiverse and the impossibility of static knowledge. Pillowcases—the landing pads of dreams, where the psyche reveals unknown truths—become the perfect metaphor for Clay’s accumulation of abstract gestures.

These fabrications—fabric pulled over and placed within armatures—answer the call for formal rigor, engaging the constructed mechanisms of surface and support. Clay could have allowed for a clean, formal mediation between armature and surface—a veiling of fabric over structure—but instead, he pushes through. By painting the surfaces and adding a wide array of materials—crayon, nails, steel pins, ribbons, and a variety of paints—he invokes a “too muchness” often associated with queerness: a surplus of affect that can feel disturbing, grotesque, or unexplainable.

These works carry a compulsive urgency that accompanies the desire to understand one’s positionality on unstable ground, from an irregular point of view. This is felt in the cyclical path I take through the exhibition, creating a kind of disturbance or vertigo.

Here, everything is bursting at the seams. Though these pieces create a place within the white walls of a gallery, Clay wants us to feel the pulsating vibration in all parts of reality. Part of the gallery’s walls are covered in mesh tape, reminiscent of construction materials used to bury seams and create the clean white surfaces where art is typically hung. The grid—the invisible structure built to enforce a kind of conformist neutrality—is made visible and interacts with the work it usually hides behind.

By placing mesh on parts of the wall, Clay reminds us of the sinew that keeps the whole presentation in balance. The support system becomes part of the piece—presence and absence laid bare.

Aimé Césaire, in “Poetry and Knowledge,” proposes: “The poetic attitude is an attitude of naturalization brought about by imagination’s demented impulses.” This impulse—the desire to reach for the hidden, buried parts of life—permeates this exhibition. Clay builds up, tears apart, and digs into the layers that accumulate over time. The show’s totality guides me, as the folded fabric reverberates back in on itself and no longer offers up the need to explain its existence.