[stretching an elastic band until it snaps, spray-paint, cardboard, elastic band, 2007]

Charlie Sofo’s studio show at ANCA Dickson (SOME THING LIKE A HUMAN) opens on Wednesday night at 6.00pm, and will be open for the next four days from 12.00 to 5.00pm. ArtWranglers is happy to email the list of works and prices on request. Please contact Willa if you want to see the show outside normal hours.

[tooth-pick, paper, ink, toothpick, 2007]

With this body of work Sofo continues with the essential ingredients of his art. A constant dimension of all of his work over the past three years has been a kind of revelation and celebration of its processes – an aesthetic of discovery whereby the processes of observing, conceiving, making, ordering, and presenting continue until the work reaches a definitive state of completion. Most often his materials determine the form of the work, and sometimes the materials are so ephemeral the completion of the work is a forecast of its own destruction. With his fascination for what evolves in front of his eyes, he neither predicts the final character of the work, nor is longevity one of his criteria. The primary pleasure for Sofo is in the discovery of the final form through its processes, and only secondarily whether the outcome is something which will appeal to others. There is also we suspect a kind of perverse pleasure in the (human) body at play. We imagine him looking at his hands and asking himself: “what have I got to work with today? Ah! that looks interesting!” and so the process begins which results in a perfect circle of finger-grease, (paper, finger oil + grime), number 5. in this exhibition.

You can see what Charlie has to say about it all on the previous post.

See all the works in the show in the Gallery at Charlie’s name in the sidebar ->

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Charlie is holding a show of his recent works at his ANCA studio in Dickson on Wednesday 31st October from 6.00 pm. Charlie is picking up sticks (and other things) and joining the Canberra diasporic artists community in Melbourne. Let’s hope we don’t lose him altogether!

Charlie explains that with this body of work he is interested in margins, or very small quantities of things. In the studio I have collected small particles and applied them to surfaces. Sometimes these particles form larger particles. Things. I have used a tooth-pick to make dots, a shit load of dots. I roll a single die 650 times, each time pressing it into paint and then into paper. The exhibition Something like a Human is a bit mechanical and a bit human, but mostly its just me.

This project has been generously funded by artsACT.

Very soon ArtWranglers will have a list of works for sale which we’d be happy to email to anyone who’s interested, and we’ll be continuing to represent Charlie in Canberra, show new work on the blog, and plan for an “at home” show down the track. We’ll be posting images of this exhibition some time next week.

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at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space’s Best in Show exhibition at Manuka until 7 October, 2007. And thence to the collection of Karina Harris and Neil Hobbs…

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Here’s a mini-retrospective in the form of four self-portraits, two recent, two from student days…

“Bed”, 2004, photogram, type-C photograph, 150 x 100 cm

“Vandamme” 2005, digital video, Duration: 4 minutes 30 seconds

“Tooth-brush”, 2007, tooth-brush bristles, paper, wood, glue, 40 x 30cm (collection Peter Fay)

“Auto-portrait” 2007, Matchsticks, wood, glue, 175 x 5 x 5cm

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Here’s Charlie Sofo in an uncharacteristic pose: a snap of a portrait of Charlie from William Yang’s current exhibition (“Breathing the Rarefied Air of Canberra, and other images”") at Helen Maxwell Gallery. Charlie’s portrait is one of 69 proofs of photographs taken in Canberra while William was the H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the ANU.

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ArtWranglers is delighted to represent the following artists in Canberra:

Axel Poignant

Jon Rhodes

Slim Barrie

Charlie Sofo

Marina Nielson

Tim Price

Rachel Jessie-Rae O’Connor

Rose Montebello

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