CHARLOTTE COLBERT | A DAY AT HOME

A DAY AT HOME CHARLOT TE COLBERT

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CONTENT 8 Foreword Mila Askarova 10 Foreword The Huffington Post 11 - 46 Works from ‘A Day at Home’ 47 - 48 A Day at Home : Gazelli Art House Installation View 49 - 50 Artist’s Statement Charlotte Colbert 52 Special Thanks

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29 th of November to 20 th December 2013 Gazelli Art House, 39 Dover Street W1S 4NN London

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Foreword Every limit a beginning as well as an ending’ George Eliot, Middlemarch

Home: a bittersweet concept of the endless pastures of freedom on the one hand and the confinements of both the physical and mental space on the other. Rationality takes a backseat as one enters the personal world of a number of impersonal characters, depicted through a consistent narrative of the physical and imaginary. The dichotomy in these naturally staged settings, allows these personas to break free from the familiar surroundings.

Walking down the same staircase, standing in the same living room, looking at the same fireplace in the master bedroom they each have a playful overview of the story that they have built for themselves. Time is on halt, the world has finally become their playground and we are the mere audience observing their each and every move.

Through ‘A Day at Home’, Charlotte Colbert masterfully presents glimpses of one’s internal and external struggles with fear, solitude, adulthood and reality.

It is the fragility of intimacy coupled with the boundless courage to explore the dark corners of a derelict home that presents an androgynous observation of facing oneself.

The cautiousness of each character whispers guilty pleasures and wrongdoings. One cannot help but wonder what if they will get caught and brought back to reality and its routine. Perhaps best to leave them to it, witness how the story unravels and invent an ending of our own. Or, we can also join them.

Mila Askarova, Founder and Director of Gazelli Art House

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Colbert’s spine-tingling series, “A Day At Home”, turns the trope of the haunted house into a surreal meditation on domesticity and self-destruction.

The images, following in the footsteps of female artists like Louise Bourgeois and Francesca Woodman, capture the moment where the familiarity of the house morphs into something strange and potentially dangerous. Delicate housewives resemble possessed spirits or broken dolls, turning the traditional comfort of the home into something altogether strange.

Like her artistic predecessors, Colbert questions the ramifications of a woman’s life trapped inside the confines of the home, when order and propriety gives way to something far darker. Dollhouses become geometric masks, limbs contort and collapse and undetermined forms cast ghostly shadows. Aligning docility and insanity, the artworks reveal what happens when a woman begins keeping house and ends up with the house keeping her.

Extract from an article by Priscella Frank , The Huffington Post

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Dining Room digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Family Room digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Guest En suite digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Living Room digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Interior Study digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Master Bedroom digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Eat-In Kitchen digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Master En suite digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Staircase #2 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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First Floor Landing #2 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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First Floor Landing #3 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Annex digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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First Floor Landing digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Staircase #1 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Basement digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Guest Bedroom #1 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Guest Bedroom #2 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Guest Bedroom #3 digital print surface mounted on dibond 2013

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Artist’s Statement Charlotte Colbert

Photography is an intimate medium. It rhythms our relationship to the world. Marking its beats. Capturing moments on which we look back as the story of our lives. It has a different relationship to the real than other art forms like painting or sculpture. Because the real is its medium. Its raw material. Its canvas and paint.

There is a long tradition of photography being associated with “objectiveness”. News, documentary, anthropological, medical pictures. They expose, chronicle, record. Everything there is to see is in the image. On the surface. The “truth” of it is a given.

But for me photography is interesting in its fiction. In its appropriation and transformation of the world. The lens operates as a portal into subjectiveness. It is like a direct form of writing. An immediate reconstruction of the real through the filter of the photographer’s feelings, opinions, psychological state, understanding, language and view of the world. “...we regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relationship to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

This strange and mysterious relationship that photography has with the real connects it for me to the realm of sleep. A state of in-between. Showing them becomes like whispering in someone’s ear the half-remembered snippets of a dream or nightmare.

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Published by Gazelli Art House to accompany ‘A Day At Home’

by Charlotte Colbert 29 th November - 20 th December 6 A Day At Home: Street View 47 - 48 A Day at Home : Installation View ©Sam Drake, courtesy of Gazelli Art House 11 - 46 Comeplete works from Exhibition ‘A Day At Home’ ©Charlotte Colbert, courtesy of Gazelli Art House 49 Photo of Artist Charlotte Colbert

Gazelli Art House 39 Dover Street London W1S 4NN www.gazelliarthouse.com +44 (0)20 7491 8816 © Gazelli Art House All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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Special Thanks Mila Askarova Philip Colbert Emily Jane Bridge Karl Gregory Lois Edwards Maxine Anastasia Andy Bainbridge Esme & Emile Tuke Sarah Toh Clemmie Vaughan Emily Andrew Kate Iddon Rachel Philips Terry Hack John Mcilfatrick Vasilis Asimakopoulos Julia Gaillard

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