Charlie Engman (US, 1987)
Residency period: March-June 2025
Based in Brooklyn, Charlie Engman is an American artist, photographer, educator, and art director for the sustainable fashion brand Collina Strada. His multidisciplinary practice examines the social and emotional dimensions of imagery and hyper-visibility in contemporary culture, with a focus on the body as a site of mediation between self and otherness. Engman’s recent work incorporates generative AI, positioning him at the forefront of exploring how technology shapes and transforms the visual and emotional dynamics of contemporary life. His use of AI interrogates how disembodied technologies mediate representations of the body, visual identity, and cultural production, offering critical insights into the evolving relationships between labor, capital, and creativity.
Engman is the author of three books: MOM (2020), a longstanding collaborative project with his mother that explores representation and intimacy; Hello Chaos: A Love Story – The Disorder of Seeing and Being Seen (2024), a genre-defying critical theory book examining contemporary visual culture; and Cursed (2024), an artist’s monograph created entirely with generative AI.
In addition to his creative projects, Engman works as a commercial image maker, predominantly in the fashion industry, and he utilizes this practice to research, explore, and engage with the role of advertisements in shaping social space and the contemporary sense of self. For his residency at La Becque, he will expand on these themes, developing a new body of work that reflects his ongoing inquiry into image-making, the body, and the economies of visibility.