Charles Mulford
Performance, Object, and Mail Art Practice
About:
Charles Mulford works across performance, object making, and mail art. His ongoing project Prosthetic Absurdity examines endurance and presence through small, ritual actions enacted in public space: parking lots, suburban malls, and wooded trails. The work centers on a silent cyclist whose repeated gestures test visibility, duration, and disappearance. Extending into digital form through QR-coded mailings and a live website, the project operates simultaneously as performance system, transmission network, and evolving archive.
Deadlight Loop, 2025.
Performance documentation.
Garage Ring Toss, 2025.
Performance video.
Artist Statement:
Prosthetic Absurdity is an evolving constellation of performances, objects, and mailed works that investigates how presence endures through repetition. At its core is a silent cyclist on a undersized bicycle. Their continuous circling and mark-making transform ordinary sites, suburban malls, wooded paths, and parking lots, into places that bear the material traces of repeated movement.
The project unfolds as a modular system that moves between live action, mailed artifacts, droning audio loops, videos, and web-based pages. Each translation extends the performance across time, medium and context. The bicycle functions as a prosthetic device: it alters the rider’s movement, increases physical strain, and turns each gesture into a mark. Those altered movements leave traces that serve as a record.
Prosthetic Absurdity does not explain itself. It persists. Its logic is recursive and circular. Every loop tests the ground. Every mark asserts existence. What endures is not the performance but what it leaves behind; the rider departs, and the trace remains.
Selected Exhibitions
2025 - Dreamscapes and Inner Worlds, Cape Cod Museum
2025 - Finger-Lickin Good, ShockBoxx Gallery
2024 - Small Matters, Colorado Mesa University
2024 - 44th Annual Exhibition, Monmouth Museum
2023 - Vivid Visions, Art Fair 14C Exhibition
2023 - Academy Center of the Arts Annual Exhibition
2023 - International Exhibition, Center for Contemporary Arts
2022 - Reemergence, New Jersey State Museum
2021 - Real or Imagined, Attleboro Arts Museum
2021 - I Didn’t Lick It, Bruton Museum
2021 - Fanciful Expressions, Fine Line Creative Arts Center
2020 - Unprecedented, View Center for Arts and Culture
Sculpture Archive (2020-2025) charles.mulford.com/archive
Collections
Walker Art Center - Permanent Collection
Special Collections, Vanderbilt University Library
Libraries Special Collections, Temple University
Media
2023 - Something Rather Than Nothing Podcast, Episode 233 (interview)
2023 - Feature Article, Morris County Artists Network
2021 - Feature Article, How a Surrealist Artist Fell in Love with 3D Printing
Education
1994 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
1991 Apprenticed, Seward Johnston Atelier, Hamilton, NJ
1990 BFA, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ