Mitchell Charbonneau “Gone in 60 Seconds”

Team Gallery

[Image: Mitchell Charbonneau "Untitled (Chair)," (2019) epoxy, urethane, stainless steel and silicone 32 x 22 x 20 in.]

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Team (gallery, inc.) presents a one-person exhibition of new works by Mitchell Charbonneau, entitled Gone in 60 Seconds. This is the tenth entry in our project room series “Gallery B.”

Mitchell Charbonneau makes subtle and fastidiously wrought cast resin and urethane sculptures and wall works with a pared-down charge and bone-dry quietude. Minute details of the original objects are precisely recreated, down to the screw heads and a tromp l’oleil rendering of texture. In his debut solo, Charbonneau conjures the studied surfaces of Vija Celmins and the charred minimalism of Banks Violette, adding his own un-heroic iconography and humor to the mix. The discount-generic objects retain a recognizable legibility and associative shadings, but their anonymity emphasizes form above all else. Painted matte black, they become one-to-one silhouettes, shadows that flatten and expand.

Charbonneau’s process is designed to leave us with impressions, emotional and physical, images that crystallize and dematerialize. Two works take their form from a lawn chair and step ladder, objects designed to collapse into flattened shapes that can easily be transported, unfolded, and adapted for use in a new setting. Invoking leisure, spectatorship, and labor, they refer to multiple sites and modes of action that speak to the production and viewership of an art object, and compound notions of function and utility.

This sensibility is further evident in a series of wall works replicating modular shelving units, each featuring a single shelf supporting a cast tea-light. The cast shelving components still perform their engineered functional duty, but are limited to a brittle futility. Whereas the freestanding sculptural works repurpose the object “as is,” Charbonneau’s shelves indicate some formal editorializing of the modular designs, exposing, undermining, and aestheticizing their structural skeleton.

Documenting and representing, the cast objects shed feeling to produce a haptic photonegative, evoking touch, give, flex, at a remove. Sensation and memory are imbued in the works, but in such a manner as to displace experience from objecthood. The self-evident presence of Charbonneau’s sculptures competes with their distant after-ness; ghostly remains with hard-edged clarity. Through the casting process the objects are reduced (or perhaps essentialized) to all surface, becoming representations, depictions of the objects from which they derive their form. The body of work is titled “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which grounds Charbonneau’s interventions and transformations in a temporality that fuses the mortal and enduring, petrified realism and obliterative abstraction.