Cecilia Charlton

Region: Northeast

Through an implementation of abstraction that relies on a neat application of acrylic paint, I offer a platform from which we can experience and discuss issues of human perception, history, and social convention. Working in a new genre that I am calling reductive scientific surrealism, I create forms that are potentially anthropomorphic yet unrecognizable, well-ordered yet extemporaneous. In the digitized appearance of the paintings there is a sense of spontaneity—suggesting the presence of a person. Paramount is the implication of disarray, buoyed by the meticulousness with which the elements are constructed; the paintings push the viewer into the space where science and humanity overlap and eerily begin to speak the same language. Through my paintings, I transform the real world, suspending time and sound, and offer a meditation on dualities: individuality/ homogeneity of the person, contemporary/archaic thought processes, and real/digital space. In art, as in life, contradictions enable subjectivity and promote personal inquiry—it is this effect that I wish to exercise in an effort to promote independent thought.