Charles Hickey (he/him, b. 1995) is a Long Beach, CA based interdisciplinary artist from Atlanta, GA. Engaging with how we see and how we represent objects in space, he pulls from the traditions of still life painting and sculpture, using the genre as an armature on which to experiment and communicate. Hickey’s heavily textured mark-making captures movement and time, etching the hand's motion in paint and plastic.

Hickey’s paintings incorporate imagery from museum collections recontextualized into compositions exploring image use, attention, memory, and time. In these works, he takes art historical images and remakes them, accentuating the brush strokes and movements on the hand in recreating masterworks. Hickey is interested in how we can hold onto an image and give it continued attention and intentional absorption and in how we can select an image and say, “I want to continue to think about this image for days and years.” The artworks engage in a conversation on the imagery we see, scroll past, and archive.

Unique to Hickey’s painting practice is the incorporation of the 3D pen in combination with oil paint, acrylic, and collage. The 3D pen melts colored filament out of a nozzle like a frosting tube. As the plastic cools, it solidifies leaving hardened “brush strokes” that appear to stay in a semi liquid state. Conversely, Hickey uses several frosting techniques to thickly apply oil paint onto the canvas in a style that mimics the rhythmic chaos of the 3D pen tool. The mark making techniques all maintain a linear application showing the path of the hand in each stroke. The paintings are a timeline of movement of the eye and hand across the canvas.

Charles Hickey’s design objects incorporate still life motifs onto our most used possessions in the home. Lamps, vases, stools are adorned with symbols exploring each objects’ relationship to the home and the passage of time. Hickey uses his signature tool, the 3D Pen, to paint with plastic onto each object. The still life motifs capture musings on the experience of time and bring an awareness into the home of time moving both slowly and quickly. The stylized renderings bring a levity to the potentially overwhelming reality of time and by incorporating these designs onto objects within the home, the work encourages pauses in daily life and a focus on the here and now.