James Charles “333 Portraits on the Devil’s Toilet Paper”
Joseph Gross Gallery
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ArtNow NY presents “333 Portraits on the Devil’s Toilet Paper,” an exhibition of multi-media works by James Charles. This is the artist’s second show with the gallery.
“333 Portraits” is dedicated entirely to the artist’s work on currency, portraits that have become synonymous with his practice. Like miniature acts of graffiti, Charles makes his art in the most guarded of spaces: our money. The project began years ago as an amusing doodle, with the artist comically altering the faces of American presidents on bank notes. Now the pastime has overtaken his work; he has found special inks and tiny brushes to match the government’s aesthetic regulations, even mastered the font of the Federal Reserve to insert his own captions.
Subversive in his selections, Charles’s roster of currency portraits are both campy and sardonic, sourcing from Hollywood celebrities and superheroes, to politicians and art historical icons. In “333 Portraits,” the stately countenance of Abraham Lincoln is transformed into a grab bag of characters, from the carnivalesque Ronald McDonald to the skinny-tie duo of Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta à la Pulp Fiction. In each iteration, the detail of the work is so fine that while the president’s face becomes wholly unrecognizable, the trademark look of the bill is preserved.
Charles’s playful banter with U.S. currency is not just a witty ploy, but hits upon the deeper economic anxieties of our post-recession age. As the artist has stated himself, money is just “dirty paper.” It is faith in the greater economy that transforms this paper into currency. Charles exploits this discrepancy, questioning the stated value of the sanctioned paper by manipulating its surface until it is “art.” Though still technically functional as money, any exchange of these altered bank notes as currency would be blatantly asymmetrical—a nod towards the tenuous nature of our economic matrix.
James Charles was born in 1963 in Seattle, Washington. He studied fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was the recipient of the Sobel Memorial Scholarship in printmaking. Later moving to Los Angeles, he worked as a studio assistant under Lita Albuquerque in the 1990s. As a trained tattoo artist as well as the co-founder of Gentle Giant Studios, a toy prototype firm in California, Charles has worked as a commercial artist across the west coast. In 2007, Charles was one of the founding members of the Oyster Pirate Collaborative Workshop, a collective of painters and sculptors based in San Francisco. He has exhibited work in various galleries and museums around the country, as well as internationally. Charles lives and works between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Media
Schedule
from September 05, 2013 to September 28, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-05 from 18:00 to 21:00