Page contents
Areas of Focus
Artists
Edited: July 17, 2023
Christopher Clary
A middle-aged man squints from the sun. He has pink skin, light-brown, mid-length curly hair with blue tips, and a long curly beard with a greying goatee. He’s wearing a black t-shirt printed with red text, a patchwork red flannel shirt, and khaki pants. Behind him is outdoor seating.

Photo by Barak Shrama for Gray Area, San Francisco.

Pronouns
He/they
Date and place of birth
b. 1968, Rochester
Current location
Jersey Shore
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2020, Rapid Response Fellow

Christopher Clary is an artist, curator, and zinester based on the Jersey shore. His social practice is all about connecting — making things that we can live through and expand with to know our own affective, queer selves.

Most recently, Clary has been on the forefront of livestreaming as technology and performance art. His collaborative streaming platform for artists, THING received funding from NEW INC, Meta Open Arts, Gray Area, Goethe Institute, and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany. In 2021, Untitled (Larry & Bobby Kissing), a networked performance for ICP was awarded by the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Then in 2020, He was an Eyebeam fellow and NEW INC member, both in support of The Chrisy Show, a talk show broadcast on an adult webcam site.

Clary’s art has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and conferences around the world from the Palais de Tokyo to China Art Book. His Rhizome commission Sorry to dump on you like this, a porn-novella-zip-file was named as the best individual work of Internet art in 2016 by Hyperallergic, acquired by the Whitney and MoMA, and exhibited at ETH Zurich. His photography of Kevin was nominated for the Discovery Award at the international photography fair Rencontres d’Arles.

Clary’s curatorial projects include a year of programming for the ICP Museum and Library (All Used Up, Emergency Readings, and Queering the Collection) that was coproduced by GenderFail and Larker and featured work by Allison Parrish, American Artist, Molly Soda, Morehshin Allahyari, Nora Khan, Paul Soulellis, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, and Shiv Kotecha. He has twice curated online pavilions for The Wrong Biennale, one on safe space and another about death in a web 2.0 landscape.

Clary’s books, including a trilogy for the poetry collective TROLL THREAD, can be found in the libraries at the Met, Library of Congress, Walker, ICP, SUNY Buffalo, SVA, Wendy’s Subway, 本 hon books, and Printed Matter.

Rapid Response Project

For Phase 1 of Rapid Response, Clary worked on research and early production for his ongoing project The Chrisy Show, a talk show streamed live on Chaturbate, an adult website for cammers. Through a series of solo shows, guest interviews, and audience participation, the artist acted as the host of a platform for the people who are revolutionizing sex and sex work, while providing an opportunity to interrogate the technology with which sex work is often entangled. With an eye towards the future, The Chrisy Show was on Chaturbate, the current dominant platform that is often rife with race and class-based discrimination, to exit it, and provide IRL alternatives driven by the queer community.

Feed

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

Support Our Work