Charlotte Kent
Charlotte Kent PhD is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and arts writer. Her current research investigates the absurd in contemporary art and speculative design, often in relationship to issues of digital culture.
Rita Ackermann: Mama '19
By Charlotte KentHer whole approach is an impressive refutation of a technical world. The gesture of the hand, with all its imprecision, is so very human. The messiness is a surprising oasis.
Auriea Harvey: Year Zero
By Charlotte KentYear Zero offers a compelling argument for dismissing distinctions between physical and digital art as Auriea Harvey's digital and material practice merge in this impressive body of sculptural works.
Hernan Bas: Developing TiME LiFE
By Charlotte KentAmidst the rise of online viewing rooms for shows we might not otherwise see, Lehmann Maupin made the decision to provide us backgrounds to shows we have. In Developing TiME LiFE, the gallery presents studies (available for sale) as well as information from Hernan Bas about the process for his most recent fall 2019 show.
Mulyana & Iwan Effendi: Jumping the Shadow
By Charlotte KentThe charming critters by Iwan Effendi and Mulyana presented in Jumping the Shadow, curated by John Silvis at Sapar Contemporary, invite reflections on our empathy towards lives (that only seem to be) beyond our own.
Gina Beavers: The Life I Deserve
By Charlotte KentThe lighting for Gina Beavers’s exhibit The Life I Deserve is Instagram perfect. That seems only fitting for paintings based on social media posts and aware that they will return there as #art #museum #artselfie or even, in a potential throwback to 2015, #museumselfie. The artist’s #Foodporn series from 2014 gets particular attention, though the newer series based on makeup tutorials had some snapping pics as well. All this begs the question, what are we looking at?
Julia Scher: American Promises
By Charlotte KentMotherhood is a role partly defined by its expectation to survey, observe, and discern, so the work also shows the shifting roles of surveillance within familial
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William Corwin: Green Ladder
By Charlotte KentLadders appear across spiritual traditions linking the lower and upper, the earthly and material with the everlasting and transcendent.
The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art
By Charlotte KentMoving past familiar questions about art, machines, autonomy, and authorship that have been around since the invention of photography, the generative artworks on view through Kate Vass’s website offers a chance to think about our respective starting points, the steps we take, and how rules apply in this game of life.
The Tree of Life
By Charlotte KentOnline exhibits provide a different viewing experience. If all these works were in the Lower East Side gallery, you might walk in, look around, occasionally watch one of the time-based works, perhaps put on headphones for sound, and meander to the next piece. The online configuration asks for greater engagement, something that surprises many by requiring a conscious commitment to the work.
![Shi Zheng, <em>Umwelt [sim]</em>, 2020. Video (sound, color), media player, screen or projector. Dimensions variable, landscape orientation, 7 min 13 sec, loop. Courtesy bitforms.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/27524/kent-tree-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Claudia Hart: The Ruins
By Charlotte KentHart travels in hyperreality, thinking through media archeologies and post-photographic practices, but is also a draughtsperson and painter. All of this merges forcefully in bitforms’s exhibit, which recognizes the failures of so many Eurocentric utopias, and yet engages modernism in a way that releases any hold those artists, designers, political and cult leaders once had.
Mary Mattingly: Pipelines and Permafrost
By Charlotte KentMary Mattingly’s recent photographs in Pipelines and Permafrost stitch together a story of geologic deep time for the imagination. The New York-based artist has always woven ecological concerns into her public works and photography practice, committed to helping audiences question how the land and water resources as well as the products and presumptions of our lives came to be.
The Archive to Come
By Charlotte KentIn The Archive to Come, curators Clark Buckner and Carla Gannis invited artists to contribute a work of their choice that responded to “questions of loss, memorialization, crisis, and re-invention … questions about what we value and want to preserve as we work to recover from their ravages and build for the future.”
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939
By Charlotte KentThe goal of MoMA’s Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939 is to showcase the ways that artists participated in spreading radical new ideas made urgent by World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution. The exhibition largely focuses on activity in what would become the Soviet Bloc, as artists enthusiastically adopted new print and distribution technologies, and embraced a geometric, abstract aesthetic that dramatized their rejection of the decadent, bourgeois parlor.
David Reed: New Paintings
By Charlotte KentIt is a cathedral to art, and Reed has produced altars to the art and history of painting. Only that makes them sound serious and stern, possibly boring, and these are not that. Most notably, there is humor throughout.
Manfred Mohr: A Formal Language
By Charlotte Kent“Computer graphics is a young and new way of aesthetic communication; it integrates human thinking, mechanical handling, logic, new possibilities of drawing, and incorruptible precision of drawing—a new DUKTUS!” So wrote Manfred Mohr in 1971 celebrating this “duktus,” the Latin term for handwriting, also used in German to acknowledge the individual peculiarities of a medium or someone’s style.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
By Charlotte KentMcCullers’s work evokes a sense of alienation—both from society and, crucially, from oneself. However, to many she also represents an enthusiastic, if not necessarily fully consummated, embrace of her own desires.
Robert Morris: Monumentum 2015–2018
By Charlotte KentThe figures falling off walls in Robert Morris. Monumentum 2015–2018, at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale, seem like an extension of the Baroque city’s architectural and sculptural tradition. The works in this show's situation in Rome provides a different set of perceptual relations than when the same body of work was displayed in New York.
Art Story
By Charlotte KentLooking back, I think I started reading stories about art because I tired of eros and arate. In the wrath of The Iliad or Woolf’s The Waves, through the passion of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Nabokov’s Lolita, humanity’s highs and lows were exhausting.
