Charles+Nelson

=Charles Huntley Nelson=

http://www.charleshnelson.com/
 * Charles Nelson's website**

//Mark Auslander comments:// Atlanta-based artist Charles Nelson's work encompasses diverse media, from painting to digital video, from sidewalk-interactions to performance art. He draws on a remarkable range of classical and contemporary artistic sensibilities and source material. He has recently been at the forefront of the artistic movement known as "Afrofuturism," fusing science fiction, pan-Africanism, mythological imagery, filmic symbolism, and pointed political critique.

see: http://www.charleshnelson.com/CNPres.swf
 * The Charles Nelson Project (2001)**

//Mark Auslander comments:// The Charles Nelson Project emerges out of the artist's web search of people around the world who shared his name and posted their photographs on line; these photos are the basis of the artist's paintings, which encircle the viewer. The Project a thoroughly unexpected kind of sanctuary, constituted entirely through visual images of visual images. The magic of the search engine transports us into a marvelously improbable co-fraternity, men on line sharing the same name as the artist. Race is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant; the uploaded digital images hanging on the wall proclaim, in effect that the name “Charles Nelson” knows no color line. In his earlier work, Nelson has explicitly been concerned with word and image, violence and slavery, memory and forgetting. Yet, in the Charles Nelson Project, the photograph holds up not a troubling mirror of the death mask, but of the endlessly refracted self, who is simultaneously not the self. In the vast, supposedly anonymous landscape of cyberspace, there turns out to be a curious kind of comforting domesticity, a reassuring touch of common, all too human ordinariness. (One friendly face even proclaims he’s “boring.”) From the security of a computer at home in Atlanta, this Charles Nelson goes traveling around the world to find his fourteen fellow doppelgangers, who now hang, gazing out upon one another, in an endless circle of bemused, whimsical merging of self and other.