Charles Mulford
Performance, Object, and Mail Art Practice
About
Charles Mulford works across performance, object making, and mail art. His ongoing project Prosthetic Absurdity explores endurance and presence through small, ritual actions enacted in public space: parking lots, suburban malls, and public woodlands. The work centers on Patady, a silent cyclist whose repeated gestures test visibility and disappearance. Extending into digital form through QR-coded mailings and a live website, the project as a whole functions as both exhibition and archive.
Deadlight Loop, 2025.
Performance documentation.
Garage Ring Toss, 2025.
Performance video.
Artist Statement
Prosthetic Absurdity is an evolving system of performances, objects, and mailed works that explores how presence persists through repetition. At its center is Patady, a silent cyclist on a small bicycle, whose obsessive looping, slow markings, and ritual traces transform everyday environments into repositories of accumulated labor. Suburban malls, woodlands, driveways, and parking lots become surfaces that bear the residue of repeated gestures.
The work unfolds as a modular structure spanning live action, postal circulation, sound, video, and web-based interventions. The bicycle is a prosthetic limb. It distorts the performer’s movement, intensifies exertion, and inscribes each gesture with physical cost. These actions leave marks that double as records. Whether rendered as an artist’s book, a droning audio loop, or a page of executable code, each form translates the original performance, extending its presence across time, medium, and context.
Prosthetic Absurdity does not explain, it endures. Like a tire circling the same ground, its logic is recursive, circular, and inescapable. Every loop marks the earth. Every mark asserts existence. Every record fends off erasure. What endures is not the performance itself, but its accumulation. It asks what remains when the body falls silent and the trace endures.
Selected Exhibitions
2025
Dreamscapes and Inner Worlds, Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA
45th Annual Juried Exhibition, Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ
2024
Finger-Lickin Good, ShockBoxx Gallery, Hermosa Beach, CA
Small Matters 2024, Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, CO
Pint Size 2, Transmission Gallery, Oakland, CA
44th Annual Juried Exhibition, Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ
2023
Small Works Exhibition, Five Points Art Center, Torrington, CT
Vivid Visions (Art Fair 14C Exhibition), Art 150, Jersey City, NJ
Not! An Art Fair, ShockBoxx, Hermosa Beach, CA
Pills, (Solo) M Galleries PNA, Washington, NJ
Your Wildest Dreams, Vestige Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
Academy Center of the Arts Annual National Juried Art Exhibition, Academy Center of the Arts, Lynchburg, VA
International Juried Exhibition, The Center for Contemporary Arts, Bedminster, NJ
Viewpoints 2023, Studio Montclair, Montclair, NJ
2022
Reemergence, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
Small Matters 2022, Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, CO
From Flat to 3D, (Solo) M Galleries, Washington, NJ
Viewpoints 2022, Studio Montclair, Montclair, NJ
In Gold, (Solo) Creal Microgallery, Ann Arbor, MI
2021
Real or Imagined, Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, MA
I Didn’t Lick It, Bruton Museum, Bruton, Somerset, UK
Five Points Gallery 2021 Juried Exhibition, Five Points Art Center, Torrington, CT
Small Works 2021, Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, NY
The Center for Contemporary Art Juried Exhibition, The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ
Fanciful Expressions, Fine Line Creative Arts Center, St. Charles, IL
Unprecedented - Art Responds to 2020, View Center for Arts and Culture, Old Forge, NY
Small Works, Jag Gallery, Key West, FL
Restriction, Clayhill Arts, UK, Bridgwater
2020
Vote Presidential Election 2020 Mail Art Project, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Big Apply VI Mail Art Show, New York Public Library, New York, NY
Pen Pal Group Show, Stone House Art Gallery, Charlotte, NC
Quarantine Mail Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
Collections
Walker Art Center, Archive, Minneapolis, MN
Special Collections Vanderbilt University Library, Nashville, TN
Temple University, Libraries Special Collections Research Center, Philadelphia, PA
Publications
Mulford, C. D. (2023, Oct. 26). Something rather than Nothing Podcast, Episode 233.
Mulford, C. D. (2023, June 9). Morris County Artists Network Feature.
Mulford, C. D. (2021, Sept. 21). How a Surrealist Artist Fell in Love with 3D Printing.
Education
1994 MFA in Visual Arts, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
1991 Apprenticed, Seward Johnston Atelier, Hamilton, NJ
1990 BFA in Visual Arts, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ