In ‘Anecdotes 3’, Charlie Donaldson presents work unburdened by modern imaging software and innovations, finding interest through a lack of compositional logic;

“Across drawing, painting, sculpture, and printed media, they have developed a visual language haunted by the residual signs of the recent past. Charlie draws on retro visual forms such as Magic 8 Balls, musty board games, LSD blotter designs, Magic Eye books, illegal rave flyers, photocopied anarchist zines, and early hacker and cyber aesthetics. These forms share a low-resolution, semi-obsolete visual language tied to underground circulation, altered states, prediction, and hidden knowledge. Many of these forms, however, began disappearing at the tail end of millennial childhood, a time when images still felt illicit, mystical, and partially inaccessible, before visual culture was flattened and smoothed out by platforms and AI systems.

In Charlie’s recent prints, these recently-retro design languages are reprocessed into dense arrangements of images scraped from deep within the web. Resembling part mood board, part storyboard, and part conspiracy wall, the prints generate tension between the extreme specificity of the image selections, including art historical oddities, technical instruction imagery, banal snapshots, and unplaceable cartoons, and their unlikely arrangement. Together, they imply the presence of some buried logic within contemporary image banks. Yet Charlie offers no stable interpretive handrail for the viewer. Their compositions resemble the control panel of a UFO: dense, symbolic, and seemingly technical, but ultimately resistant to full comprehension.”

Instagram:
Artist: @_charliedonaldson
Exhibition Text: @spencer_harvie