Artist / Musician / Educator
Boston, MA
cbluett@gmail.com
@cbluett
My artwork focuses on the relationship between landscape, narrative, and memory. I make paintings using traditional oil landscape techniques layered with contemporary material explorations. These images are composed using various types of frames and vignettes, investigating the lens of the viewer’s experience and exploring formal relationships of edge, texture, and atmosphere. With a high cultural value towards craft and the hand-made, three-dimensional elements continue to complicate and abstract the dreamlike narrative qualities of my work. These works imbue slowness and emptiness in order to express the beautiful, absurd, and ominous boundaries between fiction and reality, creating a unique American folk horror aesthetic and atmosphere.
My practice also includes sculpture installations that encourage slow interaction and close attention to detail. Many of these works use various visual and audio technologies that focus on the mechanical aspects of their operation to enhance the viewer’s experience. These objects present visual engagement and tactility without clear function which further expands the dreamlike and supernatural elements of the work. My sound work focuses on electronic musical experimentation to create slow and meditative compositions informed by my paintings and amplified in tandem with the sculptural objects.
My practice invests heavily in themes of working class life experiences and rely on the aesthetic qualities of my coming-of-age in Pennsylvania. These themes portray the idea of American blue collar beliefs and disbeliefs that are the undertones of social and political contemporaneity. My landscapes are still and liminal, experienced by the working class during moments of respite, repetition, and reminiscence. These places allow for imagination and creativity to flourish, for they are the dreamscapes and nightmares of an economic class whose culture is being systematically eliminated. I represent these ideas in honest and transparent ways while continuing to honor their ambiguity.
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CV / Exhibitions
- Commonwealth Gallery, Boston, MA - Group Show, Ramp Collective: Spaces to Move Through, Places to Be - 2024
- Commonwealth Gallery, Boston, MA - Group Show, Ramp Collective: Titles Are Everything - 2024
- Commonwealth Gallery, Boston, MA - Two Person Exhibition, Slow Excursions - 2023
- Art @ Sloane, 1 Silber Way, Boston, MA - Group Show, Fall 2023 Collection: Selected Works - 2023
- Pianocraft Gallery, Boston, MA - Group Show, Intersections - 2023
- Boston University School of Visual Art, Boston, MA: Group Show, Ramp Collective: Millennium Bug - 2023
- Sloane House, Boston University, Boston, MA: Group Show, Spring 2023 Collection: Selected Works - 2023
- Boston University School of Visual Art, Boston, MA: Group Show, Ramp Collective: View I - 2022
- Tyler School of Art Virtual Art Market, Philadelphia, PA - 2021
- The Baby Grand Gallery at The Grand Opera House, Wilmington, DE: Anybody Home? - 2019
- Works on Paper Gallery, Philadelphia, PA: Group Show, Neighborhood Watch - 2018
- Esther Klein Gallery, Philadelphia, PA: Networks Within and Around Us – 2017-18
- Front Street Cafe, Philadelphia, PA: Tides - 2017
- Westtown School Gallery, West Chester, PA: Group Show, Network Visualization II - 2017
- Creative West Gallery, York, PA: Group Show, Three Man Show featuring Mark, Zach, and Cody Bluett - 2017
- Great Far Beyond, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA: Group Show, Vice Land - 2016
- Levine Building Lobby, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: Network Visualization - 2016
- Icebox Project Space, Crane Arts Building, Philadelphia, PA: Group Show, Live/Work - 2016
- 1022 N. 5th St. Gallery, Philadelphia, PA: Bathysphere: Immersion of the Self Official Closing Event - 2016
- Stella Elkins Gallery, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA: Group Show, Student Teaching Exhibition - 2016
- Stella Elkins Gallery, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA: I've Never Been And I Don't Know The Name - 2015
- The Baby Grand Gallery at The Grand Opera House, Wilmington, DE: Horizons – 2015
- Rocket Cat Café, Philadelphia, PA: Group Show, Monsters - 2015
- Bourbon and Branch Bar and Restaurant, Philadelphia, PA: Various Works - 2014
- Tyler School of Art Rome Gallery, Rome, Italy: Group Show, Tiny Biennale - 2014
- Temple University Honors Lounge, Philadelphia, PA: Stillness - 2014
- INE Studios, Philadelphia, PA: Group Show, New Years Dissolutions – 2013