On Thursday, September 29th, Rob Carter will be the second artist participating in the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art’s first video art exhibition, Camera Lucida. Carter’s work is in the form of short videos that he creates by using various cityscapes, both real and imagined, to explore ideas about environmental and architectural change. His video “Metropolis” shows the history of Charlotte, North Carolina. Using real images of Charlotte, Carter adds in various skyscrapers and sports arenas, effectively creating what could be the future urban structure with a dystopic twist. In his “Foobel (an alternative history)” video, sports arenas grow larger and larger, taking up most of the natural space around them, until a sports mega dome envelops the screen. According to Carter’s vimeo.com description, the video is a “satire of the need for bigger and bigger stages of any popular type of theatre at the expense of everything else.” Carter’s “Sun City” features the town of Benidorm, Spain and uses stop-motion animation to pay homage to the sun and the energy it gives the city.

This video contains an excerpt of the artist’s work, Metropolis by Rob Carter.

Rob Carter was originally from Britain but now lives in Richmond, Virginia. He has shown his work internationally, with solo exhibitions at Art In General in New York, Galerie Stefan Röpke in Cologne, Station Independent Projects in New York, Galeria Arnés y Ropke in Madrid and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome. He has also exhibited at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, The Field Museum in Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Carter has been awarded a Workspace residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011–12) and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2010). He recently returned from a productive three-month residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. The respondent for this event will be Professor Magdalena Garmaz, chair of the Environmental Design program at Auburn University.

Written by Leslie Rewis, a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the English Department at Auburn University.