Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Hugo McCloud’s first solo museum exhibition, from where i stand at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. McCloud’s work has been defined by a restless experimentation, an ongoing engagement with process, an exploration of the value of labor, a concern with disparities in social and racial economics, and with the nature of beauty. His earlier work can be broadly categorized as abstraction, its veiled subject matter growing out of his experiences of being biracial and his family’s working-class roots. These influences are evident in the materials and process he gravitates to—roofing metal, tar, and most recently plastic shopping bags. He has consistently used non-art mediums to encode social and cultural memory and to reflect on notions of race, class, and economic inequity. His latest figurative works, which were influenced by his move to Mexico in 2018, are composed of single-use plastic bags, depicting workers transporting towering piles of goods on bicycles, motorcycles, and their backs, as well as the overloaded carts of the homeless and indigent. Increasingly, his work speaks of the economics of labor and geopolitics on a fundamental level, while encapsulating the artist’s interest in global culture. from where i stand occupies the entire first floor of The Aldrich and includes over thirty-five works borrowed from numerous public and private collections.
Hugo McCloud: from where i stand is organized by Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director. The exhibition will be accompanied by a forthcoming publication with essays by Klein and scholar and curator Lucy Kwabah Mensah.
