Carter's images are necessarily diffuse and repetitive. Many of the images appear to be self-portraits, but they are not. Usually I think of a self-portrait as a trenchant exploration of one's identity. A self portrait is an attempt to know oneself thoroughly. No single image of Carter's is that, though, because he finds identity to be in a constant state of flux. That's problematic for artists who try to represent identity. What happens when identity is so diffuse, multiplied, repeated, and shuffled in a myriad of external surfaces? We can attempt to pin it down, establish fixity within a sense of self, but ultimately fail. We may successfully capture a snippet of that self, say in a snapshot, but that snapshot is a mere representation of a moment of the surface of that self. An unfulfilling self-portrait indeed. How to capture and represent the self in flux? Carter attempts to keep apace the self's transition through multiples and variations. It's as if the unease, unknowability is only placated by a steady stream of images, to somehow reassure one's place, time, and look. Surface appearances must be rendered and captured continuously to reaffirm our existence. It's a constant look to a mirror. Repetition is reassurance.

The multiple image of course was championed by Warhol, an artist very much admired by Carter. It seems only photography is capable of keeping apace with the demand for representation, and yes photography is a major component of Carter's work. Yet Carter's fabric assemblages are a foible to photography's mechanization. Sewn fabric collages retrieve a sense of the "made" that photography does not. Warhol's silk screens are similar in that they are based on photographs, but find joy in being hand made images. Layers of ink sometimes slip out of register. Smudges, smears and drips are all apparent to the careful observer. Carter's fabric pieces are uncannily similar with their frayed edges, crooked stitching. Collaged in layers, like silkscreen ink, and highly graphic, they reference photography but keep their distance. One large fabric wall hanging in particular, is based on a painted 19th century photography scenic background. Victorian notions of the exotic and classical abound: columns amid palms trees and garden, swags of velvet. All was standard fare for 19th century photography studios. Carter, furthermore, reinforces the connection to the original black and white photo by limiting the colors of his fabric to a spectrum of blacks and grays.

The scenic background also references notions of periphery and substitution, themes that saturate Carter's work. Just like the 19th century version, Carter's fabric landscape background can site a photograph, but Carter's also becomes an object for contemplation in itself. No longer a scenic background relegated to periphery, Carter literally brings the background to the foreground. The sitters have been removed, and we are forced to confront the absurdity of painting or fabricating a fake place out of fabric and yet still having it represent space and myth, (ie, the romance of the crumbling garden). We can't have the real and therefore must content ourselves with representation. Representation is innately always a stand-in for the real.

When we surround ourselves with representation so completely, representation becomes the real itself. Yet we don't have to denigrate representation as falseness. There are advantages to representation. The fabric landscape can be rolled up and put away, afterall. It's convenient, easier to deal with. Like a straw. Yes, a drinking straw. Sipping through a straw is a substitution for oral sex. The straw as phallus: thin, tidy, functional straw. Sipping soda through the straw finds its inverse in an internet piss scene reconstructed in fabric. The streaming arc of piss splashes back towards the body to repeat the loop of gay self-sufficiency. The straw as inlet; urethra, as biological outlet. (In case the soda connection wasn't reinforced enough, there are Coke bottle silhouettes in the piss scene's background!)

The play of representation does not stop there for Carter. A video loop recasts the scenic fabric assemblage back into an intangible image. What was once a mere background in a book of 19th century photographs, then made tactile and physical through fabric, is now rendered intangible as video signal. Viewers may be duped into thinking that the video is actually a live feed of the fabric wall hanging with tumbling fake fire logs in the foreground. The video is actually a prerecorded looped tape. Again more layers of substitutions: looped video as stand-in for live surveillance and kitsch fire logs as stand-ins for a long gone hearth.

The video in conjunction with the fabric background is a hermetic system or self-referentiality, self-sufficiency that produces meaning from within. It's technology at work for its own sake; image production for the sake of making images. It's a self-sufficiency that alludes to gay male sexuality. It's the look and attraction of the self: the "homo-" of homosexuality. Where does the gay self look? What attracts it? What straw does it suck? It seeks affirmation in external signs, that look like it: men. Other men as mirror to the self. Men who visually construct their identities through codes, dress, gazes. Beards, mustaches, wigs, sunglasses, scars, bandages, earphones, microphones, cell phones, (even plant foliage -- as a stand-in for hair). All are accoutrements that dissimulate one surface and construct another, represent the whole, and ultimately become projections of the interior.

It's not until we acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of Carter's images does a true self-portrait begin to emerge. No single one of his images is a self-portrait. Rather, it is a fleeting attempt to render an image of the self. Only grouped as records of fleeting moments do the images begin to register the complexity of self-identity.

---Justin Yockel
NYC, Jan. 2002