Charlotte Beckett

Charlotte Becket lives and works in New York City where she is also an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Pace University. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include RuSalon in Brooklyn NY, Crisp Gallery in London, LEAP in Berlin and Taxter and Spengemann in New York City. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Gazelli Art House in London, the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, and Anna Kustera, NY Studio Gallery, Leslie Heller, Passerby and the Invitational Exhibition Academy of Arts and Letters, among others in New York City. She has been invited to lecture on her work at various galleries and universities and has been the recipient of grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Tony Smith Foundation, and the Verizon Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in; The New York Times, TimeOut London, ArtForum, and Art in America. Her work was recently included, 100 Artists, a compendium of interviews with 100 international contemporary artists by Francesca Gavin.

Beckett's work includes kinetic sculptures and installations that create projected imagery produced through analogue methods. The sculptures contain lights and curved glass lenses to project images of themselves onto the surrounding space. The light projections allude to digital screens, surveillance, hallucinations and mirages. The relationship between the physical sculptures and their projected images initiate a dialogue between physical and perceived boundaries, agency and power. Our environment is one where automation, information, consumerism, progress and erosion are collapsed into a muddle that both celebrates and questions its status quo. The mechanical sculptures she construct explore the complexities of this ambivalence through errant machinery, polished forms that collapse and resume composure, and illuminated projections or screens that depict only the looping and chattering mechanisms behind them. The work aims to imbue these absurd and irrational scenarios with a pathos, humor and aesthetic seduction so as to draw out a conversation about our own relationship to speed, progress, technology and survival within perpetually fracturing and rearranging circumstances. The work's looping, rhythmic motion transforms the sculptures from motorized machines to figural abstractions or landscapes. The mechanization in these pieces work in opposition to what we demand of the mechanized world around us. It seeks to offer something else, something that is slow and inefficient but more closely aligned with our selves.