Charlie Engman Mom
- Dupont Billboards
These four billboards feature photographs from Charlie Engman’s ongoing series Mom. In this quasi-collaborative, long-standing project, Engman’s mother has stepped into the role of muse and mannequin donning makeup, stylized hair, high-fashion and ubiquitous clothing for his camera. Throughout the series we observe a middle-aged, middle-American woman engaging with the possibilities of dress, gesture, and identity. The photographs momentarily unfix her from static visualizations of motherhood and womanhood, while challenging the relationships between parent and child, photographer and subject.
Presented in conjunction with Charlie Engman’s exhibition Mom at Scrap Metal.
Charlie Engman, originally as a movement artist, arrived at picture-taking as a form of visual notation. His images capture the sculptural potential of an action, as a detail of the setting is caught in the moment of becoming something other than itself. Engman’s images are at essence conceptual and visual solutions to the formal problem of picture making, pushing the scope and visual possibility of what he has to work with—models, clothing, props and sets, a certain space, light, the potential of post-production and graphic design. Engman playfully and cleverly confronts the artifice of his images, allowing the viewer to be privy to the boundaries and construction of his working environments.
