DARREN FLOOK | FRREHOUSE
LONDON
106 Great Portland Street
London W1
CHARLES HARLAN
Charles Harlan is a North Carolina-based sculptor whose work utilizes predominantly found industrial objects. His work is informed by the aesthetics of his surrounding neighborhood at any given time. While some of the industrial materials sometimes comes from the artist’s background, they rarely read that way. Harlan’s work has often been referred to as Duchampian in its reliance upon readymade components, its deceptive simplicity, and it spatial humor. His stacking and layering of recognizable, utilitarian materials renders surprisingly potent forms, rooted in associations of folklore and cultural excavations. His sculptures speak not only to an individual experience but a collective one that has been practiced for thousands of years.
His first exhibition at JTT Gallery in New York involved fitting a massive, one-ton metal tube in a relatively small exhibition space – a seemingly simplistic concept with inscrutable effects. Cave, 2012, pushes the ready-made to new extremes, challenging both the meaning of an object’s presence in a specific space, and the certainty of sensorial space itself. Roll gate, 2014, a 10-foot padlocked, roll-up gate, similarly relates scale and materiality to viewership by blocking a passage with a displaced object; but also revisits the story of the Ishtar Gate, the eighth passage to the ancient city of Bablyon. Harlan’s first exhibition at Kayne Griffin Corcoran included, amongst other sculptures, a jon boat installed outdoors and upright like a tombstone. Jon Boat, 2016, was inlaid with a single piece of hardwood, pierced by two holes that interact with the daylight like abstract sun dials on the lawn.
Charles Harlan lives and works in Wilmington, North Carolina. He received his BA from New York University in 2006. Selected exhibitions include: Jon Boat, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, LA, CA; The Obelisk and Dome, Carl Kostyál, London, UK; Menhirs, Rodolhpe Janssen, Brussels, BE; All Means Are Sacred, M Woods, Beijing, CN; The 5th of July, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; Flood, Pioneer Works, New York, NY; Hamlet’s Mill, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, CH; Ishtar, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY; do it (outside), Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; The Gate, Karma, New York, NY; Doll House, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY.