Charlotte Moth

The work of Charlotte Moth places itself lightly in the world (...) Strong art-historical accounts of the period from 1990 onwards are hard to find, but Ina Blom’s book On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture identifies some at least of the conditions that a group of mostly European artists were responding to in this period. Blom identifies style – notably of interiors, environments and spaces that are becoming simultaneously public and private – as a new area of concern, and as a somewhat confusing twist on the earlier twentieth-century avant-garde preoccupation with the merging of art and life. Moth’s work can be seen to share characteristics with artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tobias Rehberger (among a larger group of artists discussed by Blom), in that the space of the gallery is strongly needed as the container for a complex combination of illumination, objects, furnishings and display items, histories, arrangements and images, not all of which have the same weight, physical insistence or sculptural presence. Moth does not make exhibitions that are crowded or confusing, but a complexity and a degree of uncertainty – ‘lightness’ is just one aspect of this – is folded into the objects and situations she makes (...) ‘Sculpture’ is an abiding concern for Moth, but disconcertingly, it may be produced as a side effect of other motives, as though it cannot be aimed for directly. The persistence of sculpture is consistently tested against other conditions of display and other types of spaces: living spaces, working spaces (the studio) and also spaces of representation, study and commerce. As sculpture – which is both a potential class of objects and a historical term for them that we now use uncertainly – moves through these different spaces, it seems to have become lighter. This lightness is neither a cause for celebration – as though in victory over ‘sculpture’, mass and embodiment – nor a reason for premature mourning. Lightness is perhaps more simply a condition to be felt and known.