SCULPTURES
Mitchell, Jeffry
U.S. (1958 - )
The Tomb of Club Z
2006
Low-fired glazed earthenware, wood, glass, and metal; Handmade paper screen print on paper, wood, and cloth
Variable
Gift of William and Ruth True
FA 2017.465

Seattle-based artist Jeffry Mitchell made this sculpture from his memories of time spent inside Club Zodiac, a Capitol Hill gay bathhouse known as a site of hardcore sex and drug use. Mitchell recreated the floor plan of the club from memory using intuition and the responsiveness of malleable clay as a means to process his experience. The raw vulnerability of the exposed figures is a deviation from Mitchell's typically coded vocabulary, resulting in a personal meditation on desire, social isolation, and search for belonging and connection. While this “tomb” holds a past ensconced in personal history, it also functions as a memorial to a larger queer narrative, including the loss of life within the gay community during the AIDS epidemic that escalated during the 1980s and 1990s when Mitchell was frequenting the club.

The screen, modeled after a Japanese byobu, creates a threshold that amplifies the divide between inside and outside, private and public, and activates the viewer’s own bodily experience. It also holds iconography of personal significance to Mitchell, including the ABCDEFGH I LOVE U, a lyric from Prince’s song “Alphabet Street,” and the decorative pattern on back of the screen, which appears on an album by the Bee Gees.

Label copy for The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection, November 4, 2017 to April 22, 2018.