Abigail Clemens

Biography

Abigail Clemens (b. 1994) is a mixed-race Asian American artist from the Bay Area. She studied visual art, bass performance, and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan (2017, BFA).  

Currently pursuing her MFA at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, her artwork investigates space creation, intimacy, semiotics, and migratory aesthetics. She incorporates installation, drawing, and sound in her projects to ruminate on transpacific history and multisensory modes of cultural association and projection.  

Artist Statement

Please meet me halfway— I swear it is a really cool place.  

My installations, drawings, projections, and sound compositions are invitations to engage in reading the aesthetically ambiguous and schematically vast symbols and materials of transpacific history. I use different processes from aural to visual, and visual to spatial translation to bring people together in spaces of in-betweenness.  

Intertwining research in Asian American Studies, linguistics, migratory aesthetics, and semiotics, I am most interested in constructing fluid modes of seeing and hearing that harbor kinship amid individual psychosocial projections of culture. Fetishization and Othering happens with great frequency in the name of gatekeeping cultural authenticity, and I wish to destabilize all that. I believe that human connection is not the result of universality or cultural assimilation; rather, it is a preexisting condition in which people are already born.  

We naturally live in gooey and transient spaces where everyone can be all the things in multiple places simultaneously. I hope my artwork can help you enjoy the flow of it all.  

Instagram: @just.a.clementine

Website: abbclem-art.com

Headshot by Naail Ali, BFA '23