CHARLOTTE G. CHIN GREENE 
(they/them)

An artist engaging with virtuality, ecology, sexuality, psychoanalysis, labor, memory, and time  

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Metal Heart
Zach’s Crab Shack 
Philadelphia, PA
JUN 17-AUG 6 2023

Over the course of billions of years the Earth has evolved from an oceanic orb to a seeing machine that reproduces visions of itself. Vision may be understood as an outcome of incalculable mistakes, chance encounters, and erotic acts throughout this timeline. 

Existence as a seeing machine is a technical mode of the planet. An erotic mode. 

Further, the idea that intelligence is only now utilizing artifice dismisses the activity of Attacus atlas, the Atlas moth, whose wings mimic cobra heads. A seeing without eyes. 

Inquiries here begin with 3D scans of car headlights found on the Spring Garden Bridge, an area of frequent accidents. When scanned, these objects become skin-, husk-, shell-object. What appears as a glitch in scanning is simply a revealing of the computational technology of the scanner, an if-then seeing machine that translates lightwaves to data. 

The scanner is moved around an object by a human operator. The moment of capture is thus a gesture, a photograph more similar to a video, and yet of course wholly unlike either.  

Other objects present were once discarded into an ocean dumping site in South Brooklyn after fulfilling their use-value. Dissolved by salt water, they became abstracted industrial organs disconnected from their corpus. Some are painted grey to match the default color of objects in Rhino, the modeling software used to manipulate 3D scans. Objects coming into render. Others are painted chromakey green. Objects as sites of projection. 

The car door and the exhaust manifolds are from Kensington, Philadelphia, a neighborhood of our city many pretend not to see. A region filled with body shops. The door and the Atlas moth collide. How did we get here?

How to reveal that which is believed to be glitch as integral, systemic, code-level. Material. 
How to hold something broken as it reflects its circumstance. Comes into seeing. 

An eye is an image that seeks itself. So what of the heart?



Remote Viewing
As exhibited in ‘infinite dynamic horizons’
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Brooklyn, NY
MAY 14-JUN 19, 2022

Two-person show w/ Sydney Shavers, curated by SiSi Chen

The turning of a wheel, the turning that iterates the wheel, the grinding that grinds the wheel to a stop. Motion after all matter ceases. A dissipating vibration and a force that is still⁠—so that there may be vibration. All of it and none of it sufficiently speaks. It becomes a horizon that approaches and then is surpassed. Its surpassing reveals a sphere, or moreso, the motion of a sphere.

As I watched her pass, I saw this horizon, and then I saw its passing. And then our distance from her passing, which, after several beats (heart beats or human seconds?) vanished into a spiral. Since then, there have been so many beats that their distance is calculated by the fact of their presence, so that in the present I am as close to her as I am far.

The past compressed—her journey, my journey. It compressed into me.

I see wheels everywhere as I ride my bike. Hubcaps, more specifically. Circular perforations in their metallic surfaces watch me, like eyes. I pass them by the side of the road, sometimes whole, usually fractured. Traces of a cataclysmic event. The particles produced by an atomic collision, which evidence the force that determines their mass. A motor, a spindle, a hip socket.

For a moment, they are recovered, in my picking them up. What remains when everything is stripped away. The asymptotic present: the wheel, the sphere, and the horizon—surpassing.


Remote Viewing is an installation with CNC-fabricated, cast, found, and electronic objects that present the virtual as material. Image-making —from cave painting to satellite technology, from the pulse of an electron along a copper wire to the appearance of a digital image on an LCD screen— is a history of recursive modes of seeing mediated by tools. This is not to except non-human forms of biomimicry. Rather, it is to address a scale of vision, without eyes as we know them, which sees and shapes the world. I study how recursivity relates to the perception of space and time, and its effects in the realms of planetary-scale computation, cosmotechnics, global industry and labor.

Objects in this installation made from found and recycled high-impact ABS plastic, often used in car manufacturing, are connected in a remote viewing system. "Remote viewing" is a term for remotely accessing cameras on networked devices through the internet. It is also a pseudoscientific belief that a person can see or perceive objects located elsewhere. For a person experiencing dementia, the latter is not out of the realm of possibility.

This work is about witnessing my grandmother in her final stages of dementia, during the first year of COVID-19, primarily through video calls. A parallactic experience. Grief magnified through the starkness of Zoom and the vastness of the ongoing global pandemic, as well as racial and socioeconomic pandemics afflicting Philadelphia. Broken auto parts I saw while cycling (my sole method of transportation) came to signify a grief carried through not only my reality, but also the enormously complex circulation of material both viral and industrial. The act of picking up pieces of ABS plastic, manufactured in China, Taiwan and scattered along Diamond Street, Master Street, Aramingo Avenue, is simultaneously greater than, less than and equal to the sum of total actions that constitute this situation. To imagine such an act as the origin point of an iterative process of making limits my work to a linear scope, a human narrative, a single author, a final product. And anyways, an origin is just a coordinate reference that must be assigned.

I am gleaning—giving care to— remnants of memory, and imagining a circumstance by which they break from a repetitive loop and recurse, drawing a long gesture through their evolving forms, bearing witness to the motion in which we are altogether situated, and one day all together again.

In loving memory of 梅秀娴 (Sau Han Moy Yee) (March 19, 1927, Shanghai - January 28, 2021, New York City).

-Charlotte G. Chin Greene, November 2021

Tack and Hide
Wick Gallery
Brooklyn, NY
APR 27–MAY 19, 2019

Two-person show w/ Christopher Roberson

Red Work
Miranda Kuo Gallery
New York, NY
JUL 16, 2018
2:30-6:30PM

"What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?"
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven


Red Work was a performance about failure and labor within discourse. For four consecutive hours, I swept 40 pounds of red sand in an open gallery. Passerby were free to participate or observe. The performance was streamed live on instagram.

What work is to be done and who does it? How can we push ourselves and others beyond the shuffling of minutiae, the endless feed of inactivity?

Lamerica
Bible
New York, NY
AUG 13 - SEP 10, 2017

Two-person show with Lionel Maunz

Artforum - Critic’s Picks


Clothed in sunlight
restless in wanting
dying of fever

Changed shapes of an empire
Starling invaders
Vast promissory notes of joy

Wanton, willful and passive
Married to doubt
Clothed in great warring monuments
of glory

How it has changed you
How slowly estranged you
Solely arranged you

Beg you for mercy

Jim Morrison, Wilderness Poems (1966-1971)