In this talk, artist Charles Gaines will discuss his early work involving systems and numerals and his most recent work with language and representation, rethinking notions of subjectivity and how they are manifested in works of art. He will discuss the fine distinction between chance and arbitrary judgments on the one hand and expressive and intuitional judgments on the other, and how artworks can uniquely interrogate this difference.

Highly regarded as both a leading practitioner of Conceptualism and an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles–based artist Charles Gaines is celebrated for his works on paper and acrylic glass, photographs, drawings, musical compositions, and installations that investigate how rule-based procedures influence representation and construct meaning. He has had more than eighty one-person shows and several hundred group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including the 2007 and 2015 Biennale de Venezia. In 2015, he presented a critically acclaimed retrospective exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum. Gaines has received a US Artist Award, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2015 CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, and is the 2018 honored recipient of the REDCAT award.