Gallery Wendi Norris

Presented in the venerable tradition of the faux-museum, Kluth's photographs, paintings, and sculptures literally and imaginatively unpack the rock collection amassed by her geologist father over four decades of travel across four continents.

By celebrating disinformation and irrational organization, and using a personal visual vocabulary that draws on educational dioramas, interior decoration, taxonomies and theme parks, the works in this exhibition attempt something impossible: to access the landscapes and narratives of another person's life through its accumulated objects and stories. The resulting installation is a physical manifestation of the artist’s father’s vision and understanding of geologic time and matter as manifested through the imperfect lens of what he has shared with his daughter. Working from sketchy formal descriptions of favorite specimens, Kluth has (mis)recreated and abstracted from the samples Dr. Kluth has collected. The faux experience of a natural history museum, full of humor and irony, will be heightened through the use of wall based info-graphics, pamphlets and giveaway badges offered to visitors. An unreliable and imperfect context for learning is made available, a layman’s education offered by an unqualified artist instructor.

By abstracting from the rocks themselves, Kluth grapples with the insufficiency of re-creation and retelling in the face of the impassible mysteries of immediate family. A poignancy comprised of the overall experience manifests, as questions surrounding a person’s aggregation of knowledge, thoughts, feelings and experiences and the impossibility of full or accurate transmission to subsequent generations is examined.



Kluth is a Bay Area based artist, curator and writer. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. Visitor Center is her first solo exhibition with Frey Norris, though she previously appeared in 2009 as part of “Theory of the Unforeseen” with Laurel Roth.