Page 74 - ART GIANTS issue of World of Art (WOA) Contemporary Art Magazine

WHITNEY CLAFLIN:
I WAS WEARING THIS WHEN
YOU MET ME

Whitney Claflin’s first solo museum exhibition, I was wearing
this when you met me, brings together over twenty new and
recent paintings alongside drawings, photography, video, and
sculptural interventions. On view from March 27 to August
25, 2025, the exhibition traces Claflin’s evolving approach
to painting and her engagement with themes of infatuation,
misrecognition, and waywardness. Her works blend lyrical
abstraction, gestural sketches, snippets of text, and repurposed
logos, forming compositions that follow an intuitive, associative
logic, akin to a mixtape or poem. Claflin embeds personal and
cultural references throughout her paintings, incorporating
nods to 1970s flower-power motifs, Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles, Providence’s late-90s DIY scene, and elements of
everyday branding.
New York City’s dynamic energy is a recurring presence in
Claflin’s work, surfacing in references to storefronts, signs, and
streetscapes. From drippy brushwork evoking urban walls to a
price sticker from Academy Records, her works capture fleeting Whitney Claflin. Die Eisdealer. 2024. Oil, oil pastel, acrylic on canvas.
cultural moments, revealing the uneasiness of shifting societal Courtesy the artist and Derosia, New York
norms. She integrates discarded objects, Juul pods, decals,
SIM cards, and makeup, onto her surfaces, layering daily leftover items like yogurt cups, receipts, and matchbooks,
detritus with defiant gestures that twist traditionally feminine further examining the residues of daily life. These works
adornment into something subversive. function as a fragmented record of lived experience, inviting
The exhibition includes a suite of drawings accompanying viewers to consider the ways images dissolve and reform,
Claflin’s book of poetry, Food and Spirits (2022), depicting much like the process of shaping identity in an ever-changing
landscape.

Whitney Claflin. Ten Nineteen. 2019. Oil and graphite on found fabric.
Whitney Claflin. Cinema. 2023. Oil, nails, bracelet on canvas. Courtesy the Courtesy the artist and Derosia, New York
artist and Derosia, New York

74 WORLD of ART