On view on the second floor of a quiet brownstone on Jefferson Avenue, a certain ghostly charm hangs around the work of Cathleen Clarke. It’s a presence that is somehow both literal and figurative.

Directly, her paintings are adaptations of images Clarke collected of family members and related found objects. These are projected forward representationally into oil and onto canvases, where her striking, muted palette of colors morphs them into unspecific and formless memories that are themselves, in turn, both uncanny and mysterious. 

But it’s Clarke’s choice, or perhaps that of time, to blur out the faces which speaks most directly to the spookiness that floats so purposefully in the air during the tenth month of every year. They look like ghosts, caught suddenly in the act of being really ghostly.