Charlotte Zhang: Tireslashers

Charlotte Zhang: Tireslashers is on view at The Polygon November 28 – March 8.

About the Exhibition
The works of Los Angeles-based artist Charlotte Zhang are inscribed with the histories of petty criminals, rogues, ruffians, and indeed tireslashers (her contemporary variant on labels found as far back as Elizabethan Era moralizing rogue pamphlets). Such outlaws, she observes, both threaten the very idea of property/propriety that define upright members of society, and they personify the fantasy of individualism and heroic citizenship. The most powerful actors in the system (politicians, law enforcement) take pleasure in styling themselves after the very same people whom they criminalize and subjugate. The rogue is both damned and heroized. The coney and the coney catcher are two sides of the same coin.

For her first solo exhibition in Canada, Zhang combines Bloodsport/Playground Rules (2023—ongoing), a series of sculptures crafted from public bench dividers (engineered to prevent people lying down); together with Rogue Pamphlets (2025—ongoing), a new series of hand-sewn collages, printed on variously textured fabrics using the sublimation dye technique. The effect is rich in colour, evoking Tudor tapestries and Baroque paintings, and intricately coded with survival tactics for now and tomorrow.

An artist who moulds language as deftly as any tangible material, Zhang’s chosen vocabulary of sumptuary law, colonial bandits, ‘degenerate’ Others, effacement, disguise, disappearance, and the mythical Ring of Gyges makes imaginative links across five centuries of civic strife. These terms are also interwoven into her first feature film, Tycoon, which the artist describes as “a deconstructed hard-boiled mystery about two young grifters coming of age against the backdrop of a near-future Los Angeles, marred by Olympics turmoil and cockroach conspiracies.”