A Master of Dreams & Nightmares...Charlotte Colbert at Gazelli Art House July 1 — August 16
Charlotte Colbert’s forthcoming show at Gazelli Art House, to open this July, examines and plays around with the familiar icons of instant communication. Colbert, a natural visual storyteller with a penchant for the surreal, examines temporality through the prism of how we relate to the emoji and whether these digital icons are capable of transcending borders and cultural differences or an invasion of personal expression.
While recent studies show that the meanings of emojis can vary hugely between platforms, causing miscommunication, Colbert takes the digital image and places them over the faces of her naked female subjects in a derelict setting. The genesis of the idea for the show started when the child of one of her friends saw a butterfly on a window and tried to zoom into the creature to try and make it bigger.
Herself a new mother to a baby girl, she thought about how we technology relates to us on a human level and how it has become as perfunctory as eating and drinking. Colbert explains that she started thinking of civilization in the developed world as parodies of emoji families, she says, “There’s something wonderful about technology but something very dark. We’re coming back to a symbolic way of writing but it’s someone else’s interpretation.” As theories of the ‘sassy pink lady emoji’, and what it means is world news in itself, Colbert focused on creating juxtaposition between old and new, to recontextualise her subjects within human temporality and history. Half-erased figures disappear against crumbling walls.
Colbert questions, what trace will the digital age leave behind? Shooting in her staple black and white medium format film, she uses double exposures to layer images of circuit boards, artificial intelligence and electronic waste presenting ghostly, holographic portraits where computers and human life are intertwined and fused into one. Colbert shot the series in a now-abandoned, former lesbian commune in east London. Many of the female nudes who appear are members of a feminist commune in the capital, brought along by one of the subjects, a friend of Charlotte’s, an ex-model-turned-stripper. Colbert explains, “There was something really powerful about the nudity on the shoot and I thought it tapped into a fantasy of ancient Greek female warriors.
Colbert has developed a strong visual identity as an artist. In addition to her solo shows, and large-scale public displays, her work has been shown at major international fairs such as Hong Kong Basel, Istanbul Art Fair, Miami and Photo-London.
Her photographic work is strongly anchored within the language of film and storytelling. Her pictures are mostly conceived as a series, a sequence developed in script format before being shot. Her work has strong philosophical undertones, and often plays on questions of time, space and identity.
Colbert’s work has been likened to the surreal work of Toomer, Breton and Dali (Phaidon), an “exploration of the human mind” (Vogue) and as “existing in that space of dreams and nightmares” (Las Ultimas Noticias). Laura Bailey in Vogue wrote: “A truly original visual storyteller, her images are hauntingly evocative”. Dorothy Bohm photographer and co-founder of the Photographer’s Gallery in London has written of her “Some photographers take pictures and others make them. Charlotte is most definitely in the second category, her pictures a gateway into her search for meaning and her very special way of seeing.”
Private view
30 June 2016
1 July — 16 August 2016
Gazelli Art House, 39 Dover Street, W1S 4NN
www.gazelliarthouse.com
+44 207 491 8816
