BIO
Following a career as a fashion model Corinne Charton decided to pursue her interest in art at Central Saint Martins with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, 2003 and went on to complete her MA in Fine Art at Middlesex university in 2016. She has held four solo shows: The Muse at 269, London (2004) "Twin Obsession" ,StART SPACE, London (2006) "Lips and Satire" The Muse at 269, London (2019) and "Pieced Together" The Muse at 269, London (2021). Her work is in public and private collections, including Central St Martins, University of the Arts London. artuk.orgSelected Group Shows
2018 The 15 years Residency programme retrospective exhibition, The Muse at 269, London2018 Venice Vending Machine project 7, Tate Exchange, Liverpool, UK
2018 4th BEEP Painting Biennial, Swansea, Wales
2018 22nd International Video Festival VIDEOMEDEJA, Novi Sad, Serbia
2018 Exceptional Art Award - Collyer Bristow, London
2017 Venice Vending Machine project, Giardini della Marinaressa, Venice, Italy
2017 West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, USA
2017 Out Of The Blue at Greylight Projects. Brussels/Hoensbroek, Belgium
2017 Exceptional Art Award - Collyer Bristow, London
2016 Vision at The NUNNERY - Bow arts, London
2016 Graduate Show, Middlesex University, London
2016 Heap of Language, Gasworks, London
2016 Oriel Davis Open, Powys, Wales
2016 OpenLoop, Riverside Studios, London
2004 The Muse at 269, group show, London
2003 Graduate Show, Central St Martins, London
2001 Unmarked, Rossi Gallery, London
1999 Canon Now Vision, V&A, London (photography)
Education
2017-2018 Extended Film course, City Lit, London2016 Graduation from Middlesex University, MA Fine Art
2003 Graduation from Central Saint Martins, BA Hons. Fine Art
1995-1997 Two year part-time BTEC course in Art & Design @ Kensington and Chelsea College
Corinne Charton: Portraiture Unmasked,
Alexandra M. Kokoli
Corinne Charton lifts images from the margins (and occasionally the centre) of the art historical canon as well as from the glut of photographs of the famous and the anonymous. Her titles are also sometimes lifted from the tabloid press and irreverently repurposed. Thoroughly contemporary words I hope my lover will not chip a tooth when he goes down in my newly vajazzled lady bits) are placed in the mouths of fashionable women of their time, vividly if incompletely rendered in hues similar to their originals but set against backgrounds lifted from elsewhere. In Charton's video work, the revelatory promise of portraiture is further disturbed through facial mashups, splicing, reordering and sound desynchronization. In the age of face lifts and transplants, faces hold back their truth, obscuring their assumed transparency. The artist probes and comments on these emergent conditions by giving form to their potential fallout.
Charton's deceiving portraits and withholding close-ups do not partake in a postmodern emptiness of the image (Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, Routledge, 1995). Rather, an unexpected and disorienting plenitude flows out of these representational shells. Beneath the hollowed out faces lies a motley crew of passions and ideas: the eternal vicissitudes of carnality; love lost and found; the feminist art historical imperative of (re)discovering women artists of the past; that old chestnut, looking and being looked at; the troubled marriage between images and meaning; and last but not least, the pleasures of painting and making. Liberated from their codes and contexts, the artist's materials (canvas and pixels, skin, eyes, landscape and audio fragments, the contrived blankness of studio interiors) are launched into wayward adventures. All there is for us to do is follow them.
Alexandra M. Kokoli is BA Fine Art Joint Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. Her monograph The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice is published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2016
MA FA Degree show, 16-22 September 2016
