Zoë Charlton: My First Name is Hers

About

Zoë Charlton’s solo exhibition at Iris Project emphasizes the power and importance of the Black matriarch within her family history. Charlton’s maternal grandmother Everlena Bates was a domestic worker in Northern Florida, and while she never discussed the details of her work, generational memory bears the scars of labor abuses and injustices experienced by domestic workers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. 

In the Reared series of collages, Charlton works with found illustrations of little white girls from the 1950s, embraced by their Black caretakers, enveloping figures, voluptuous and naked but for the masks of their African ancestors. Fusing these three distinct archetypes, Charlton draws attention to the plight of the domestic worker, an invisible figure tasked with raising the children and managing the home of their employers for minimal compensation. The Homebodies series also deploys that same found imagery, but this time grafting them onto the iconic suburban houses of their fictionalized upbringing. These unnatural hybrid forms reveal the claustrophobic and frankly racist historical fiction of the white American suburb. Faced with each other, Reared and Homebodies hold an uncomfortable conversation about nature, nurture, and the fictions we are starting to dismantle in this country.

In her newest series, Charlton expands upon the concept of women as the source of life, particularly her grandmother’s role in cultivating her own sense of independence and creativity. In Meant for the Homebred, we see a woman’s strong thighs rooted at the base of the work: out of these legs grow trees and flowers, leading to an upside-down house exploding back into a verdant cornucopia. The upended house is a replica of her grandmother’s home in Tallahassee, a family touchstone that has since been torn down to build a subdivision. In these often mystical collages, Charlton creates monuments to her grandmother and her ancestral home, a legacy that has fallen victim to the violent erasure of non-white suburban America.