Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce Ipseburg, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Baltimore-based artist Zoë Charlton. The exhibition will open on January 21, and be on view until February 25, 2023.

What is an “ipseburg”? The word “ipseburg” is a compound word combining ipse: the Latin word for self and burg: a castle or walled building. Ipseburg is Charlton’s self-actualized term for a place, both real and imagined, that we are born into or have built with others. It represents a space where one matters and is worthy of care and protection. It can be tangible like the homestead in struldbrugs, a belief system that affirms self, or an imaginative version of the self as found in Blue Flip Flops (Immortal series).

The exhibition, Ipseburg, features selections from three series of works by Charlton that focus on the body, material culture, and ancestry in large-scale drawings through self-portraiture. In the Immortal series, Charlton portrays herself as the Titan Cronus, eating digitized and flattened versions of African masks sourced from internet searches. Genetic testing, history books, and objects at cultural institutions offer a contextual understanding of one’s history, but an ancestral void of knowing lineage still exists. Cut off from their genealogy, these Black women are consumers of simulacra of ancestors. The Spirit Squad series depicts women wearing athleisure and African masks, like ancestral cheerleaders in seductive selfie poses. The hair protrudes from or overpowers the mask, obscuring the face of the cheerleader. The struldbrugs series continues Charlton’s investigation into self-portraiture. Created at The Brodsky Center with collaborative paper-maker Nicole Donnelly, this small edition includes four unique variants. Charlton translates her image as a life-size watermark on handmade cotton paper, standing over a stenciled pulp painting of her grandmother's estate in Tallahassee, Florida.

Zoë Charlton (b. Eglin A.F.B., FL, 1973; thrives in Baltimore, MD) received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin (1999) and her BFA from Florida State University, Tallahassee (1995). Her work has been shown widely domestically and internationally in exhibitions at museums such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Drawing Center. Her work has also been exhibited at galleries such as Monique Meloche, Haas & Fischer Gallery, Wendy Cooper Gallery, and Steve Turner Contemporary. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Drawing Center Viewing Program, The Hirshhorn Museum, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and Artpace. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, The Huffington Post, ARTnews, The International Review of African American Art, and Art in America. Her work is included in museum and university collections such as the Birmingham Museum of Art, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas Art Center, Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. She is a full Professor of Art and the Director of Graduate Studies at George Mason University along with being the co-founder of Kindred Creative Residence + Agro-ForesT. Her work is currently on view in A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration at the Baltimore Museum of Art.