Claudia DeMonte. Drowning in My Own Expectations Scuplture

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Agnes Gund, president emerita of New York s Museum of Modern Art, wrote in the foreword in the monograph entitled Claudia DeMonte, that she marvels at how tenaciously and passionately DeMonte has explored the relationship of images and women.  One senses a vibrant, concerned, empathetic soul in them all.   An essay in the monograph, by art critic Eleanor Heartney, states that the artist s travels had made her increasingly aware of the way objects act as surrogates for important issues in our lives.

Determination and grit have, without exception, for decades, been key roles in DeMonte s sculpted subjects from earlier homemaker with pewter everyday items, to traveler with luggage tags from around the world, and consumer with an archetypal high-end Birkin handbag, all encrusted with pictographic configurations, and her powerful visually narrative 2022 bronze sculpture, entitled Leap of Faith, featuring a woman atop a staircase, positioned to dive into space.  In this current body of work, DeMonte s pony-tailed surrogates convey unfamiliar emotional impressions: angst and uncertainty.

To the sculpture titled Drowning in My Own Expectations, she adds the descriptive word, Worry; about the sculpture titled Next Step, she writes, This woman, with her pony-tailed head, has many legs, each going in a different direction. She must choose, as we all do in life, which way to go next   These works reflect today s moment and how women globally are attempting to navigate.  She has utilized dreams and objects symbolic of female gender materialism as sources of inspiration for her art.  Still, in this current body of work, a remarkable sense of irony is evident in her sculptural narratives.  The imagined scenarios now portray a different psychological presence.  Worry, anxiety, and uncertainty are the informers of her art. These are dilemmas DeMonte presents for viewers to take seriously.