CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Paris-based artist Charlotte Moth’s first US solo exhibition Seeing while Moving features photography, sculpture, slide projection, and film. Moth grounds her practice in documenting architectural spaces, both exterior and interior, as well as the objects housed within. Beginning in 1999, Moth has formalized her Travelogue series, an ongoing project in which she photographs architectural spaces encountered during her travels throughout Europe and elsewhere. Without captions or any note of date or location, these analogue photographs coalesce into a larger project that functions beyond a simple recording of individual places and times. Moth’s Travelogue serves as source of many of her installations; paying close attention to overlooked details like corners and crevices, or the play of shadows, she renders mundane objects and spaces as magical and strange.

At the center of her exhibition at the List Center is Noting Thoughts (2011), a group of table assemblages comprising photographs, short poetic texts, and colored theatrical gels. Her living images (2016), three wall-mounted sculptures of life-size hands cast in bronze and holding a variety of commonplace objects, introduce Moth’s central theme of tactile modes of perception. The slowly rotating Lurking Sculpture (Rotating Rubber Plant) (2016), a 3D-printed reproduction of a houseplant mounted on a granite plinth, presents another mundane object removed from its familiar, domestic context.

The final work in the exhibition, Study for a 16mm Film (2011)—a digital transfer of a 16mm silent film produced at a residency in Porto, Portugal—functions as a meditation on color and light, staging and display. Moth films a series of mirrors and other reflective objects on furniture, framed by curtains, all in luminescent color. The moving camera variously circles the enigmatic objects or captures the reflection of light and shadows caused by their own movement. Devoid of people, Moth’s experimental gleaming devices appear like a mysterious stage set. The film, and the exhibition as a whole, is driven by the artist’s continuous probing of conditions that influence our perception and her metaphorical attempt to peek behind the surface of familiar things.

Charlotte Moth (b.1978, Carshalton, UK) lives and works in Paris. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vadúz (2016); Tate Britain, London (2016); Esker Foundation, Calgary (2015); De Vleeshal, Middleburg, The Netherlands (2014); Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva (2012); and Musée départemental d’art contemporain, Rochechouart, France (2011), among others. Moth was educated at UCCA, Canterbury and the Slade School of Art in London, before completing her training at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Charlotte Moth: Seeing while Moving is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.