writing, curation.
animalistic tendencies
Charlotte Kingsnorth
Objective Gallery
Scalpel in
one hand
foam in the other,
Charlotte Kingsnorth
admits, the mind summons Frankenstein
and Doctor Waldman.
A metamorphosis is in progress, sculpting foam, something comes alive. Was it the kink in the leg? The suggestion of an ear? The artist does not overthink it, each work is an exploration of that
moment.
Lawerence Weiner said art is "where you try to do that funny thing where you don't want to fuck up somebody's day on their way to work, you want to fuck up their whole life." Charlotte Kingsnorth invites you to question reality as you know it. Addressing a present moment rife with simulations, the artist presents functional objects in visible states of metamorphosis. These are not simply perversions of identity but open questions.
Led by instinct, Kingsnorth deepens the techniques she has come to be known for, salvaging and restoring pre-existing furniture frames; acts of intervention sans the divinity. In forming new lives for past objects, the artist approaches hyperreal lands.
The reuse of old things is a recognition of an ethereal quality reserved for objects with a previous life, an embodied value unique to humans. Another layer.
Like the eyes of a painting following you around the room, discomfort is not the goal but a byproduct of the uncanny. For the sake of comparison, Animalistic Tendencies offers a marriage of human, animal, other, use it as mirror, map, desk, but whatever you do–don't forget to feed it.
Words about the words and show.
Exploiting the psycho-social scenery at that time, Baudrillard’s (then less weary) idea of a “hyperreality” was employed to inscribe common collective anxieties and spike Kingsnorth intentions: warping perception through material manipulation.
hyperreality: a state where the distinction between reality and its representation collapses. "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none." - Jean Baudrillard
Reality unbuckled its seat belt long before May 2023, but skepticism: fact, fiction, disputes with actuality, continued at speed. Animalistic Tendencies prodded hoping to disturb the undisturbed. a “slippery when wet” sign for stumbling minds.
Anthropomorphic chairs spun unsettling slow, atop motorized disks like a gameshow prize. Color matched floor, walls and plinths revoked defining lines making a mess of coherence.
No definitive beginning, edge, end. Skinned Platforms imitated “nature” wrapped in high-gloss hyper-real imagery of stones.
The conceptually-driven show walked like fine-art, talked like fine-art. Doubling as a declaration for Objective Gallery, then new on Spring Street: Never-ever furniture showroom. Signalling their intentions to co-sign, not contemplate this new wave of “art-furniture.”