Zoë Charlton

 

 

While at a residency in 2010, I found myself in a community where the usual subjects of my drawings were unavailable. My temporary geographic relocation changed the demographic I was used to inviting to my studio. I made a simple, yet strategic shift in the subjects depicted in my drawings–instead of black women, I drew white men. This shift gave me room to ask broader questions about cultural tourism.

In the series Paladins and Tourists, white males are stripped of typical class symbols. The objects the men wear disclose their relationships with blackness—their political leanings, personal ties, and racial exoticism.  The festoon collages pick up where the previous series ends. The signifiers of cultural tourism and histories are expanded to include architecture, southern landscapes, and other tokens. The dramatic and absurd festoons that precariously weigh on the backs of both white and black men represent the complex history of colonized populations in the southeast US. More directly, in the large-scale drawing and collage installation Companion, Constant, the weight of African colonization is carried on the back of a young African man, Kalulu, the companion of the white explorer Henry Morten Stanley.

Zoë Charlton is an artist based in Baltimore whose drawings explore the ironies of contemporary social and cultural stereotypes. She depicts her subject’s relationship with their world by combining images of culturally loaded objects and landscapes with undressed bodies. She received her MFA degree from the University of Texas at Austin and participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Creative Alliance, and Art342. Her recent exhibitions include ConnerSmith, Washington DC, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, and Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in national and international exhibitions including the Harvey B. Gantt Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Studio Museum of Harlem, Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland. Charlton is an Associate Professor of Art at American University in Washington, DC.  She is represented by ConnerSmith, Washington D.C.