Fascinating Light Painting

Caleb Charland has been playing with matches for as long as I’ve known him and probably since he was a child. He’s also been playing with power tools, fireworks, electricity and bacteria, among other things. This comes as no surprise if you know that his childhood summers in Maine were spent, not swimming and playing with friends, but wielding tools and working on the house with his father. Driven by a fascination with utilitarian objects and a tenacious curiosity for the fundamental forces of nature, his photographs provide us with a visual proof of his inquiries and observations. Charland is the artist as engineer, scientist, inventor and magician.

From his earlier black and white images made in the basement of his family’s home to his recent work produced during his residency at Skowhegan, performance has been an integral part of his practice. Rarely does Charland appear in his photographs and when he does allow us a glimpse of himself, it is as an apparition- ghostlike hands drafting a cube in light, a transparent silhouette from which a cascade of flames emanates or a disembodied hand spraying fuel on the fire. Still, his images offer us clear evidence of his activities and interventions.

In Charland’s latest body of work, he takes his performances out of the studio, adopting environmental settings. Silhouette with Matches represents the accumulation of a simple action, lighting a match and tossing it in the air, repeated hundreds of times over the course of an evening. Only by compressing time into a single image could this temporal event be documented in such a dramatic fashion.

Scheduled to receive his MFA next month from the Art Institute of Chicago, Charland already has prints in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Progressive Collection as well as numerous private collections.