User:Clar elizabeth/sandbox

Claire McNeely is an American artist, writer, blogger, and faux-architect. Her writing tends to focus on the internet, configurations of art and experience on the internet, and visual culture. She is the most prominent member of the group known as the Cyber Surrealists, who dominated the art scene in LA during the 2020's.

In 2016 she gained notoriety for her show entitled i will not make any more boring art and her subsequent expulsion from the University of Georgia. The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she swore multiple times in an apparent state of drunkenness on a live discussion program on American television which later gained internet recognition.

She was arrested and briefly jailed in 2031 after a controversy concerning the legitimacy of her works, a problem that she continuously dealt with throughout her career.

Linked with movements such as dadaism, she is known as a pioneer in the themes of appropriation and chance, ushering in a new school of thought concerning originality and the artists claim to authorship.

Claire McNeely currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Early life and education
Born in Macon, Ga, McNeely lived an average childhood. Her mother Ginger McNeely had her at age 19. While she never met her biological father, her mother married her adoptive father, Jason McNeely, when she was 2. At age 5 McNeely attended a catholic elementary school, claiming that by age 7 the schools teachings had turned her into an atheist. After false claims that her teacher hit her during class, her mother, Ginger, moved her to a montessori school where she remained until high school. Citing these years at montessori of Macon as crucial to her creative development, McNeely later went on to donate a library and activity center to the school.

After grade school, McNeely returned to her catholic schooling, attending Mount de Sales Academy during her high school years. Her father and grandfather attended the school before, but her legacy did not grant her any special privileges. Citing multiple problems with the schools administration and the general atmosphere of ~petty high school bull shit~, McNeely claims that the four years spent at this school were the most retarded years she ever spent alive, and basically, she wishes she could take them back. Not that she didn't have fun or friends or shit, i mean damn she was class president one year, she was def on that popular game, but looking back, the amount of time she wasted at that sad excuse for an education is absolutely fucking ridiculous. She could have EASILY learned everything she learned at that school in 2 years and started off with her art career way sooner. one time tho, she and her boyfriend had this party and the cops got called and she got handcuffed but it was literally like the biggest party ever but whatev.

After high school, McNeely attended The University of Georgia. Yeah, I know, why? Hope scholarship, that's why. Had to stay in GA. whatev. Everyone was all, "why didn't you go to scad?". Bitch, she didn't want to? also uhhh u got 30k a year for me to spend? please send it my way. Anyway. So she starts UGA, living life, then she, god knows why, joins Fabric Design. What a bad decision. Many of those bitches were crazy. McNeely doesn't like drama. Fab Dez = D R A M A. After 2 years of enduring this bullshit, McNeely is so damn ready to be done for summer, then she goes to bonnaroo, does too much acid, you know the drill.

After returning from her drug endured psychosis, Claire came to her senses and left that stupid fucking program and, after a brief stint in photography, finally joined the program for her, Art X, the most progressive major at her lame ass conservative school. But damn, if that bitch still couldn't deal with that shit.

In 2015, after 6 years in art school, Claire, finally set to graduate, was expelled after a plagiarism incident. During her exit show, McNeely revealed a large scale painting which incorporated over 50 stolen works of art which had disappeared from gallery walls throughout the school during the year preceding the show. McNeely, while claiming the artwork to be appropriation rather than plagiarism, was swiftly expelled for disobeying the schools honesty policy. Days before graduating with a BFA in new media, McNeely was dishonorable discharged from the university.

Not that she gave a shit.

In the months following her expulsion Mcneely began working at the telemarketing company DialAmerica. Over the course of her career, Mcneely quietly maintained steady employment and advanced to the position of assistant to the regional manager.

Career
After first receiving nominal fame for her exit show and subsequent expulsion, Mcneely moved to Los Angeles and began working with the art collective Dis Magazine. After making contacts, she began collaborating with the Electronic Arts Intermix and appropriating videos from their collection to begin her career in remixing archived videos of other artists, such as Richard Prince, Tracey Emin, Ryan Trecartin, Paul McCarthy and others.

Recognition
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal included McNeely in a selection of ten top emerging US artists including Dash Snow, Rosson Crow, Zane Lewis, and Keegan McHargue. More recently, in 2029, McNeely was the recipient of the inaugural Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts, the world's largest juried individual fine art prize, awarded by Tyler School of Art, he received the New Artist of the Year Award at The First Annual Art Awards, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and she was awarded a 2029 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Work
McNeely's works include performance, installation, film and "painting as action". His points of reference are rooted, on the one hand, in things typically American, such as Disneyland, B-Movies, Soap Operas and Comics – she is a critical analyst of the mass media and consumer-driven American society and its hypocrisy, double standards and repression. On the other hand, it is European avant-garde art that has had the most influence on her artistic form language. Such influences include the Lost Art Movement, Joseph Beuys, Sigmund Freud, Samuel Beckett, and the Viennese Actionism

In 2030, Mcneely was charged with theft after a large quantity of paintings and other works of art were discovered in her LA studio after reportedly being stolen. The charges were dropped individually as the works themselves appreciated in value after McNeely stole them and claimed them to be her own. This stunt officially ranked her in the art world as one of the great appropriationists.

Theory
By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, McNeely touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognised, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations. . With a conceptual approach, she uses references and ideas that are so integrated into the process of the composition of the work that they may escape those who do not take the time to explore how and why these images haunt you, like a good film, long after you’ve seen them.

Her works are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages and situations as well as depictions and ideas that can only be realized in conceptual art. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, she wants the viewer to become part of the art as a kind of added component. Art is entertainment: to be able to touch the work, as well as to interact with the work is important. Her works sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, she makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. The work tries to express this with the help of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor. Her works often refers to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. Through a radically singular approach that is nevertheless inscribed in the contemporary debate, she creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.

Her works bear strong political references. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, she uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. The work incorporates time as well as space – a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit. Her works are a drawn reflection upon the art of conceptual art itself: thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism – made present most palpably in the artist’s exploration of some of the most hallowed of modernist paradigms. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, she tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of function following form in a work. Her works are based on inspiring situations: visions that reflect a sensation of indisputability and serene contemplation, combined with subtle details of odd or eccentric, humoristic elements. By emphasising aesthetics, she seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. Her works directly respond to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context.