The Middle Moves: Abstraction at Full Tension: Rush Baker IV, Caroline Kent, Ashanté Kindle, Erika Ranee and Leslie Smith III

CHART is pleased to present The Middle Moves: Abstraction at Full Tension, an exhibition curated in collaboration with Leslie Smith III, bringing together Rush Baker IV, Ashanté Kindle, Caroline Kent, Erika Ranee, and Leslie Smith III. Through distinct approaches to painting and material practice, the five artists use abstraction as a language that can carry history, memory, identity, and lived experience without requiring those subjects to become fully recognizable. The exhibition locates their practices within an active and unsettled middle, where distinctions between abstraction and representation, cultural meaning and formal invention, and image and object remain open to negotiation. Rather than seeking resolution between these positions, The Middle Moves considers what becomes possible when their boundaries remain permeable.

Abstraction has often been positioned as a movement away from recognizable experience toward the autonomy of form. The Middle Moves begins elsewhere, considering abstraction as inseparable from the histories, experiences, and ways of seeing through which its languages are inherited and transformed. Accumulation, fragmentation, erasure, translation, and reconstruction recur throughout the exhibition, not as evidence of a shared style but as strategies for constructing, obscuring, and revising meaning. Painting consequently moves between image, object, body, and environment. The “middle” names this mutable territory, not a compromise between established positions but a space from which those positions themselves can shift.

Rush Baker IV brings historical reference into direct contact with abstraction's instability. Through dense, layered surfaces in which imagery is constructed, disrupted, and partially obscured, Baker considers how histories are produced, remembered, and revised. His work places the past in an unsettled relationship with the present, allowing historical information to remain active without fixing its meaning or resolving it into narrative.

Caroline Kent approaches abstraction through language, translation, and the limits of communication. Geometric, organic, and calligraphic forms operate across expansive fields as components of an invented visual syntax, suggesting communication without yielding to direct interpretation. Kent makes incompleteness productive, letting meaning emerge through relationships among forms while resisting a single translation or fixed reading.

Ashanté Kindle draws upon hair as both cultural reference and generative formal language. Waves, curls, and coils transform gesture, repetition, texture, and movement into tactile surfaces that move between painting and sculptural presence. Kindle demonstrates how abstraction can emerge from culturally specific experience while resisting the expectation that identity become representational, explanatory, or immediately legible.

Erika Ranee builds abstraction through accumulation, material incident, and the interplay of intention and contingency. Pouring, spraying, staining, layering, and collage keep successive actions visible within her surfaces, preserving rather than concealing their contradictions. Her paintings become evolving records in which control and accident, construction and erosion, coexist without being reconciled.

Leslie Smith III extends the exhibition’s negotiations into the physical structure of painting. Shaped and multi-panel works use seams, edges, adjoining forms, and shifts in surface to move between image, constructed object, body, and architecture. Smith makes the boundaries of painting materially unstable, allowing composition to move beyond the picture plane and into a direct relationship with the surrounding space and the viewer’s body.

Across these five practices, The Middle Moves proposes no singular definition of contemporary abstraction. Historical reference coexists with formal invention, cultural specificity with ambiguity, language with opacity, and painting with objecthood. What connects these artists is not a common appearance but an investment in abstraction as a mutable language that can hold multiple kinds of experience without reducing them to a single account. The middle is therefore not a destination between established poles, but a position capable of moving them.◆