June 17 – 21, 2020
2020년 6월 17일 – 21일
Media Gallery B, CICA Museum
They Don’t Make Emojis For How I feel, or Maybe They Do.
They Don’t Make Emojis for How I Feel, Or Maybe They Do, is focused on the humor and anxiety of being the most connected humans in history and feeling the inability to truly communicate. This existential absurdity is laid out in this exhibition through an immersive audio piece and a series of animations. The space is filled with portable radios to surround the audience with the distilled laughter shared between the hosts and guests on American National Public Radio. This laughter both alienates and encourages the audience to join in with an unknown punchline. The characters within the animation offer a fractured portrait fueled by the artist’s affective reaction to an overwhelming barrage of consumable media and the expectation of portraying an idealized self on social media platforms. The walls are lined with images from the animations engraved on transparent acrylic that has been inflated to distort the original subject. These deformed depictions show these icons as fallible, as well as how they fit into the feedback loop of media babble.
Eric D. Charlton is an American artist originally from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Western Pennsylvania. Charlton’s work is exploring the desire for meaning and the lack of human understanding on a cosmic scale to the minutiae of the everyday. He embraces an open studio practice that centers around a broad definition of objecthood and the absurd acts of humans trying to make sense of the world. He earned his MFA at Syracuse University. Charlton has been the recipient of residencies at Tuner Semester Residency in Los Angeles, CA, Kimmel Harding Nelson, Nebraska City, NE, as well as Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Farmington, ME. He has exhibited internationally, including the 2019 Miami University Young Sculptors Competition at Hiestand Galleries, Miami University, Oxford, OH, Das Giftraum, Berlin, Germany, Bratislava, Slovakia, Monte Vista Projects Los Angeles, CA, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH, and Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge, MA. Charlton currently works at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, as an instructor of Ceramics, Sculpture, and Digital Art, as well as 3D Technical support for students.
Eric D. Charlton,”NPR laughtrack” (2019)