Clara Lang Ezekiel
Clara Lang-Ezekiel is a Franco-American visual artist born and raised in Toulouse, France by a French father and American mother. She recently received an MFA from Kingston School of Art in London, having previously earned an MFA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland, and a BA in both Studio Art and History from Denison University in Ohio. She is primarily a screen printer but uses a variety of other media in her work including drawing, bookmaking, installation, and collaging. She is currently based in Paris, France.
My artistic practice is anchored in my background in history. I use my artistic voice to provide a platform for stories that have been suppressed from mainstream history. Women, minorities, and colonized people are often relegated to the footnotes of our history books, which I seek to address through my practice. Right now, however, we are in the process of writing a major chapter in global history, first with our response to the Covid19 pandemic, and now with the Black Lives Matter movement. My work has been transformed by both. The pandemic has made me change my medium. Using an ancient version of photoshop and a hand-me-down tablet I have spent the last six weeks teaching myself to draw digitally. My preferred medium is normally screen printing; I specialize in hand-painted reduction screen printing but also use the emulsion-based technique, though only with hand drawn designs. I highlight my love of analogue processes to emphasize how big of a shift in my practice moving to digital has been. As luck would have it my way of drawing my screen print designs adapts perfectly to the digital process I’ve grown to love.Confined as I am, I began portraying my plants and my cat. Less than two weeks into my new practice, George Floyd was murdered and Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the world. Since I am quarantined in Paris, I was frustrated at not being able to join the movement alongside my friends and family in the U.S. so I decided to use my art to amplify the voice of the protesters on the ground. For the past month I have been creating protest art that activists can download for free. The pandemic forcing me to turn to a digital format has turned out to be much more conducive to spreading the posters to where they’re needed. So far, I know they have been used in protests across Ohio, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, as well as Paris (where I distributed some myself), but it is impossible to know where else they may have been printed. The list of potential subjects for my portraits is heartbreakingly long and growing impossibly fast so this is an ongoing series. This is only a sample of the art I have created for the protests, but you can find the full series (which I am constantly adding to) as well as the free download link on this page: http://www.claralang- ezekiel.com/black-lives-matter-posters
