Clare Gatto and Kara Güt: Porphyry Gates
July – November 2026
Opening reception 5:00 – 7:00 pm, Saturday, July 25th.
Abattoir | Quarter
2615 Detroit Ave, Cleveland
Abattoir is very pleased to present a new installation piece by Clare Gatto and Kara Güt, collaborative partners in digital lens-based media both based in the Midwest. With backgrounds in photography, film, and video, Gatto and Güt’s ambitious work, Porphyry Gates, is the culmination of an earlier installation, Magic Circle, presented last year at MOCAD, Detroit and the pair’s continued efforts in their digital studio practices. While world building is the core interest, this manifestation consisting of commercial light boxes, vinyl murals, photographs and photogravures offers a different experience visually and philosophically into a specific fabricated environment. The exhibition takes its title from porphyry; an igneous stone made of crystals embedded within a fine-grained matrix. This composite structure mirrors the construction of the exhibition's portals and wall vinyl, which are generated through photogrammetry by assembling many photographs into a three-dimensional landscape before compressing it into a flattened image. The "gates" of the title suggest the thresholds between physical and digital space, hallmarks of Gatto and Güt’s collaborative installations.
Presenting this work in Cleveland offers historical parallels with lens based experimental work in the 1970s. Other video champions who lived or passed through Cleveland in that era included Jamie Davidovich, the Argentinian video artist, and Howard Wise, the Cleveland based art dealer who founded Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in New York in 1971.
Clare Gatto and Kara Güt are two image-based digital artists working collaboratively on hybrid installations inspired by fantasy role-play video game design. These installations are based in the world of a fictitious fantasy of their own making, called "The Cloud of Unknowing." Each installation serves as a "level" for the game, becoming a generated constellation of patterns and texture, using the image as its central building material. Using strategies of input/output, they construct spaces that collage the physical and digital, creating imperfect translations and impossible objects. Existing within this precarious duality, the works emerge as copies of copies, or artifacts extruded through digital space and back again. They have collaborated and shown work together over the past 15+ years while attending Ohio State University and Cranbrook Academy of Art. They live and work in Columbus, OH and Detroit, MI respectively.
Image: Portal VIII, 2026, photogravure, 14 x 16 inches. Image courtesy the artists.