Claire Colette: Somewhere Inside the Machine

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present _Somewhere Inside the Machine_, Claire Colette's first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view September 10 through October 16th, 2026 the show brings together a new body of paintings that expand upon the artist's investigations of language, nature, and the presence -- or absence -- of the divine. The exhibition's title, drawn from the poem "Gnosticism VI," included in Anne Carson's _Decreation_, points to one of Colette's central preoccupations: the body, the earth, and society as interlocking systems: machines within machines, painting as a machine for thinking. _Decreation_ is based on Simone Weil's concept of decreation: the undoing or dissolving of the self as a path toward a truer self, and in turn a truer relationship to the world. That sense of an internal system extends to a gnostic framework Colette has long been drawn to — the idea of a "divine spark" housed within matter, and of the painting itself as an access point. Colette builds her surfaces from the ground up, mixing resin with dried flowers, ash, salt, and acrylic — a practice that began when she found herself contemplating ritual, magical thinking, and what makes an object resonant. Her process is inseparable from these ideas, invoking a perceptual exploration of universal and natural phenomena. Colette's meticulously rendered, reductive compositions function as portals or thresholds between the felt world and something more elusive: states of expanded consciousness, deep time, and cosmic order.