One of the most striking features of Bruce Charlesworth's activity as an artist is his versatility: since the mid 70s he has worked with photography, video, narrative text, performance and set design, and much of his work has a strong sculptural and architectural aspect. It is in his large Cibachrome photographs that all his concerns come together most completely. Like moments of suspended narrative, these painstakingly staged and constructed, intensely coloured and highly charged images combine overblown melodrama and psychological tension with absurd humour and redirected cliche. As series, they cut across a range of genres from Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler to soap and TV chat show, inviting recognition and yet, in lightning changes of mood and event, defying logic and confounding expectations.
Charlesworth is a masterful creator of atmosphere, through manipulation of colour, form, space and sound, and is able to instill an almost abstract, or stereotypical, hyperreality in the most mundane of objects or actions. His concerns are with the business of contemporary living, with the urban and suburban environment and with such issues as natural or man-made catastrophe, media, surveillance and conditioning - all aspects of a larger, public reality which can invade, overtake and skew the self-imposed order and banality of everyday modern existence.
A vital part of Charlesworth's work is the creation of large-scale 'narrative environments'. For this exhibition, in an interesting departure for the Gallery, he is creating a new environment entitled Stranger's Index, which allows the viewer to enter fully into the work, to walk on set and inhabit the artist's fictional space.
The environment is to be a claustrophobic combination of constrained and open spaces, repeated structural columns and flashes of colour, pattern and event, dramatic lighting and a sound/video element alternately humorous and menacing… it evokes the quick-fire change, recurrence and random association of dreams, and raises questions about difficulties and deficiencies of perception, psychological disorder, and about the possibility of individual choice in the face of uncontrollable forces and of blind fate.
The environment will be seen alongside a broad selection of the artist's Cibachrome photographs from the last ten years, excerpts from his serialised photo-novellas, and colour drawings and models of his earlier theatre sets and installations; the juxtaposition should emphasise the interrelation, and the strongly photographic nature, of all his work.
This is Bruce Charlesworth's first major project in Europe. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the International Center of Photography, New York, and widely around America; and his photographs and videotapes are in many public and private collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has won many awards and grants for his work, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A major book on his work, Private Enemy-Public Eye, is to be published by Aperture and the International Center of Photography in November, and will be on sale from the Gallery bookshop.
For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.
