Zoe Charlton - Paladins and Tourists| Mia Feuer - Stress Cone | Coble/Riley Projects - Ascension/Immersion

Conner Contemporary Art is pleased to present concurrent exhibitions of
“Paladins and Tourists,” featuring new drawings and video by Zoë
Charlton; “Stress Cone,” a new sculptural installation by Mia Feuer; and
the premier of “Ascension/Immersion,” a collaborative video project by
Mary Coble and Blithe Riley.

> ZOE CHARLTON

Zoë Charlton, best known for depicting sexualized bodies of black women,
presents a new series of nude white male figures in her second solo
exhibition with the Gallery, “Paladins and Tourists.” The themes of
these large-scale drawings were inspired by the artist’s interactions
with young white male art models. Charlton observed, “It was interesting
that some of the men made efforts to define themselves in relation to
me as a black female artist. They seemed eager to align themselves with
me by telling me about certain interests, like Reggae music, or about
causes they support, like Water for Africa.” Charlton’s experiences led
her to conceive of her subjects as modern day paladins, or knights -
who, instead of going into battle, volunteer and donate money - and as
tourists - who sample unfamiliar, exotic cultures.

Charlton adorned her bare, white male models with tokens of their social
beliefs, or souvenirs of their cultural adventures. Rather than toting
weapons and saddlebags, the “paladins” carry water bottles, and shoulder
bags. The “tourists” wear passport pouches and African emblems. To
symbolically enhance their male power, the artist posed the models in
provocative stances and, in her depictions, increased the size of their
sex organs. The theme of dominance interacts with that of exotic
souvenir collecting to evoke historical traditions, including European
colonization of foreign lands and the collecting culture of the Grand
Tour. As these precedents reverberate in the predominance of Western
paradigms in today’s culture industry, Charlton’s drawings suggest a
cultural critique.

Charlton delves further into a personal examination of colonialism and
exotic objectification in “Be Sarah” a new video animation about Sarah
Baartman (a South African slave who, in the early 19th century, was
exhibited for public entertainment in England and France as a specimen
of curiosity known as the “Hottentot Venus”). In the video, Charlton
reverses the focus from Baartman’s body to her consumer audience,
re-imagining the way Baartman felt her difference as crowds of European
spectators openly gawked at her on-stage.

> MIA FEUER

Mia Feuer’s “Stress Cone” is a special *gogo art projects exhibition
featuring a large, site-specific sculptural installation modeled on
electrical transformer stations. Feuer stated that she drew conceptual
inspiration for this work from Michelangelo’s depiction of matter
receiving the spark of life in the Creation scene on the Sistine Chapel
ceiling. By suspending a complex structure of muscular forms from the
gallery’s ceiling, the artist created a disarming presence in the
gallery that may feel to viewers both familiar and disorienting. Feuer
punctuated her industrial imagery, combining protruding vertical beams
and pressure tanks, that allude to biological generation, with
hot-colored elements and electrical insulators that may trigger
emotional associations. She further enlivened the massive structure by
representing clusters of water-dwelling leaches that appear to cling to
and spread over the electrical structure.

> COBLE / RILEY PROJECTS

Mary Coble and Blithe Riley make their collaborative debut with the
Gallery as Coble/Riley Projects in their two-channel video
“Ascension/Immersion.” On-site in the woods of Maine, the artist team
transformed an abandoned decaying, spring house into a platform for
performance by cutting two large holes in the roof, which allowed a sole
performer (Coble) to enter the structure from above and then exit from
below. We watch and listen as the protagonist repeatedly drops 5 feet
into a pool of water inside the spring house, then climbs outside
through the roof, to drop in the water yet again, with no explicit goal.
The performer’s sequential actions of emergence and ascension are
visible simultaneously on the split screen, creating a sense of
dislocated time. The continuous unfolding of an unexplained ritual
within the format of “Ascension/Immersion” generates an absorbing visual
rhythm, while the ambiguity of the video’s imagery gives rise to
various possible meanings that can attend the oscillation between
internal and exterior states.