Charlotte Segall

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My studio practice is a proposition: does effort give meaning to life? The characters in my paintings and drawings are versions of myself: each of them lusts to break through the banal, most of them give a sardonic nod to romance in the hopes of being liked. Through these surrogates, I flail and strive. Watch me pause to consider, indulge, titillate, and turn away. These women come out of the fog like freight trains bearing feathers. They balance there and tangle with the ether before washing away. This transience echoes something of experience; our identities and memories shift as much as the molecules of which we are made. My paintings are unplanned, and test my reservoir of anatomical and art historical memory as paired with a vocabulary of energetic marks. Bodies, tumultuous form, and flatness interact as motion. These ingredients are churned-up in ways that relate to Baroque painting as much as Chaos Theory and fractal math, since each of these propose patterns in grand scope. From this lateral observation, my work proposes that complex and intertwining form is the articulation of what it feels like to exist within a chaotic system. The Baroque as the face of my organized chaos is not a neutral affectation, but one rife with ambivalence toward absurd conventions of beauty and grace. My painted surrogates grapple with the fact that there is no transcendent position from which to both participate in and object to their culturally-formed personas. In heroic moments they...

Artwork