For everything and anything at LOS/NR Gallery, Sophia Cleary presents a group of altered, institutional relics sourced from UCSD Surplus Sales. A decommissioned medical exam table, used vaginal specula, and discarded clipboards are re-presented by Cleary as props, resurrected for a new performance. The two-part piece Campus Benefits, 2025, comprises a grid of clipboards that displays an organized collection of dust previously removed from its counterpart, the exam table. The crumpled, dirty rags, neatly tamed by the clips, evoke an illegible form of note-taking. Another clipboard is used as a surface for a charcoal drawing of the underside of a face, foreshortened to the point of abstraction. Some clipboards are marked with the phrase “Campus Benefits” handwritten in Sharpie, a vestige of their prior use at the university, and whose explanation of benefits remains hidden. Scope, 2023, is another sculptural work that alludes to the medical industrial complex, serving as an additional discarded tool of the institution. More visceral, this piece is a nested group of metal vaginal specula that resembles a machine gun. In each of these works, Cleary continues her investigation into regimes that discipline the body, whether the medical or, in her current capacity as an MFA student, the university. Cleary’s work highlights the ambivalence surrounding the harm and benefits that institutions such as these provide, which vary in their levels of care and neglect as they organize people into systems that de-personalize the individual.

Table Read, 2025
For Table Read, Sophia Cleary presents a series of charcoal and graphite drawings of two de-commissioned medical exam tables that she sourced from UCSD Surplus Sales. Drawn on-site in a black-box performance space at UCSD, Cleary employs the protocols of a figure drawing class as her script, but instead of a nude model and a circle of artists rendering the central figure, all roles are re-cast in this counter-examination of absence, remnant, and perversion.

Performance Practice, 2024, series of graphite drawings and mixed media sculpture, University of California San Diego, CA
The drawings are renderings of sites where performances take place. These objects function as stages — the body activates these objects and additional bodies are always implied — whether audience, examiner, or captor. By juxtaposing imagery that invokes the medical, carceral, or athletic, a common theatrical language emerges. What kinds of disciplinary regimes do we volunteer ourselves for — for the sake of betterment, order, and “progress”?