Victoria Charleson & Kel Mur

media release: "I want to tell you that…" is a collaborative installation of work from artists Victoria Charleson and Kel Mur.

Charleson started an ongoing mixed-media project in 2020 consisting of self-portraits shot with Polaroid film and vintage objects, which she paired with typed quotes gathered from different authors, artists, and Instagram memes and fragments from Charleson's collection of diaries. Her work portrays a story of love, longing, heartbreak, and residual sorrow, aiming to communicate a modicum of what has never been and likely never will be spoken. Viewers are invited to linger, investigate and rummage through Charleson's private world and to contemplate not only her secrets, feelings of nostalgia, and unfinished business but also to reflect on their own. 

Kel Mur also explores themes they started examining in 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, examining how it sets the stage for our adulthoods. The work in this show particularly questions the power of nostalgia and how necessary it is or isn't to look back into the past. Mur observes the impact of the generational gap between them and their parents: the first wave of Baby Boomers (1947 & 1949) raising a Millennial (1987) as their first female child. The work uses this friction to try and understand how it shaped the nuances of their sexuality, gender identity, and expectations in romantic relationships.  

I want to tell you that… evokes feelings of loss, the hauntings of disappointment, dark humor, and the frustrations of relationships (romantic or otherwise) as they are influenced by a rigid gender binary and personal trauma.  

Authors quoted in the work: Victoria Charlson, Jennifer Pappas-Yennie, Florence Welch, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, Tahan Grant, Random unknown Instagram meme(s), Fiona Apple, Jessie Murph, Russel Brand, Lana Del Ray, Christabel LaMotte, Warsan Shire.