InLiquid Gallery

Capturing the Surreal highlights the work of three artists, Charmaine Caire, Kelli S. Williams, and Eva Wu, inventing bright and new realities. Vibrant, color-forward, and an explosion of energy, each artist’s work is a commentary on society that begins with the question: what is real and what isn’t? Through photography, artificial reality, and animation, the artists evoke dream-like fantasies that intertwine their lived experiences with their interaction between the physical and the virtual world. Immersive and powerful, their work dives into a space of light and color that threads humorous narratives of the visually and conceptually surreal. Kelli Williams and Charmaine Caire bring puppets, dolls, and figurines to life in their photography, Williams with a certain familiarity with the so-present social media space, Caire in the absurd scenarios she stages, both existing in the in-between of reality and fiction. Eva Wu's potent and saturated use of color and textures extorts intimate otherworldly dimensions reminding us we are somewhere idyllic, somewhere unfamiliar.

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Charmaine Caire was born in 1950’s Trenton, New Jersey. She was raised in post-World War 2 Levittown and graduated from Tyler School of Art. Fascinated by both the disposability and eternal life of plastic toys in the tableaus she built, Caire created both connection and dissonance. These objects combine to create a very short story or one-scene play, drawing the observer to question their own connections and role in the story.

A Pew finalist, featured in solo shows such as the Woodmere Triennial of Photography, Special Project Gallery (NYC)and Exhibit A, highlighted in the New Yorker Magazine and Camera Arts Magazine, and a fellow of the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, to name a few of her accomplishments, Charmaine has produced four decades of “stop and think” work.

Statement -
I look for the most difficult projects and then push the boundaries. Since the early 1980’s, I have been experimenting with many materials, subjects, methods, and mixed media to deliver something different. I’ve applied this philosophy to my glass, ceramics, photography work and other mediums. The journey can seem provocative, but it works. My visualization of the subject, hands-on construction, and employing old-school methods continue to inform my photographic work. All photographic and digital printing was done by me to ensure absolute color control. Building elaborate sets, mainly consisting of repurposed toys and objects, lit with a combination of old-school hot lights and gels, captured by film and digital means, and compelling storytelling led to award-winning work. Both my fine art photographs and editorial illustrations employ wry humor to challenge and provoke an engaging response. My purpose is to force the viewer to balance a rational vision of life with the unconscious. Capturing the surreal is what I’ve been doing for more than four decades.

Kelli Williams is an animator and visual artist. In her personal work, she uses stop-motion animation, photography, augmented reality, installation, and humor to create work that comments on society through the lens of social media and technology. She is an alumna of Morgan State University where she majored in Fine Art, with a concentration in photography. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art in Design. She is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been featured in the Huffington Post, Columbus Live, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Baltimore magazine, and Netflix’s Cops and Robbers.

Statement -
Social media is the nucleus of modern society. Conversations on even the heavy topics of politics, cultural appropriation, sexuality, and religion are all driven by it even if you are not present on any of the interfaces. As a person who grew up with it as a major part of my life, I am both dependent and highly critical of it. Through animation, photography, installation, augmented reality experiences, and humor I hope to create work that comments on society through the lens of social media and technology. My work is never grounded in reality. It walks the line between reality and fiction representative of the subconscious or the idea of our “virtual selves”. Humor and satire is a driving force to my work because I find that humor creates a “safe space” to create dialogue on sometimes difficult subjects matter.

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Eva Wu (b. 1992, Santa Fe) is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia for the past decade. They have been awarded fellowships from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Velocity Grants, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, Center For Emerging Visual Artists, Elsewhere Museum, and the Leeway Foundation. Their work has appeared at over 100 exhibitions and film festivals internationally, including Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oakland Museum of California, and Schwules Museum Berlin.

Currently, Wu teaches as Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College while pursuing a graduate certificate in Time-Based and Interactive Media graduate at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design.

Artist Statement -
A versatile artist, Eva Wu's bold works span moving image, social practice, interactive installations, and collaborative projects. They delight in art as visionary future-telling, utopian spell-casting, public erotics, celebration, permission, color as political power, and remedies to uproot shame. Their work grants permission to celebrate and inhabit ones innermost fantasies, an antidote to repression and sex-negativity.

Statement - ‘An Extension of Eva’s World’
“Using 3D animation, this work is a vision of utopias - representing alternative dimensions and possibilities of what could be”.

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