Library Street Collective is excited to announce our participation in the 2025 edition of EXPO Chicago at Profiles (Booth 240), where we will present a solo exhibition of Allana Clarke’s work from April 24 through April 27, 2025.

Clarke is a Detroit-based artist whose practice engages with concepts of Blackness and the powerful connection between the body and problematics of representation. This presentation will feature Clarke’s latest series, A Rhythm: Black & Sweet, alongside two new sculptural hair bonding glue works and a video of the artist at work from her solo exhibition Allana Clarke: A Particular Fantasy at Usdan Gallery at Bennington College (2022), created in collaboration with artist Corrine Spencer.

In A Rhythm: Black & Sweet, the works invite viewers to slow down and linger deeply in (B)blackness, to understand the ever shifting multiplicities of the word and forms of embodiment. By continuing to center hair bonding glue as a material, Clarke challenges art historical usages of chromatic blackness, which have often been fixed to ideas of negation.

“I’m thinking of black not as an end or a site of negation, but as a beginning and a site of destabilizing multiplicity. I’m thinking deeply about how material is applied to the surface through repetitive, accumulative, meditative gestures and processes—first pouring quantities of uncured bonding glue directly onto the surface of the linen and forcefully pushing it back and forth until it starts to cure and clump into masses resembling neural synapses and tumors fused to the linen. I then incorporate cured glue residue twisted into thread-like forms and gestural fragments created from molds of other works, creating a conversation between the various iterative forms of the bonding glue material,” says the artist.

In her sculptural hair bonding glue works, Clarke begins by pouring thick pools of hair-bonding glue onto a mesh surface on the floor, creating a ‘skin’ that she stretches, pushes and pulls, ripples and molds using her hands and feet. Through this active technique, she transforms a consumerist material into striking and tactile forms that defy the material’s traditional use.