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poster

RATTLEBONE

Coralys Carter MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 4, 5:00 - 7:30 p.m.
April 7 - April 11, 2025 by appointment
Main Gallery + Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

In RATTLEBONE, Coralys Carter lends flesh to memory. Through sculpture, etchings, and textiles, Carter contends with the places memories reside: in our objects, in our homes, and in ourselves.

Maxine Clair’s 1994 novel, Rattlebone, centers the fictional all-Black neighborhood of Rattlebone in Kansas City, and the “no-name invisible something” that settles over a family’s life. RATTLEBONE, borrowed and abstracted, shapes the tongue around the word “raddle,” a wooden tool essential to the tension and pull of warp threads on a loom. Carter’s work sinks into the many meanings of objects, their uses, and places within and outside of the body where memory is made. The Midwest, its landscapes, its objects, and its people are central to the memory-scape that Carter takes up in RATTLEBONE.

A life in southern Illinois is returned to by the creation of a slippage in time: memory is refashioned through the materials that make a house (plaster, wood, glass, foam, paper, metal, concrete) and the objects that construct our memories (photographs, hair, letters). Carter considers time as a perpetual point of access within our bodies—we inhabit her memories with her in the present. A corridor is made between Carter’s body as it exists now parallel to the way it existed in her memory. This co-creation through the present body and the past self folds time, rendering it as physical as the people that slipped through the Midwest via labor, the Great Migration, and the circumstances that brought her into being. 

Carter plays in what cannot be named, embracing the essential nature of feeling in refashioning our lives as they have come to pass and will go on. RATTLEBONE serves as an invitation to re/member: What does a memory feel like? What objects make up a self? What must be remade to remember? What do our bodies remember?

RATTLEBONE explores memory as a point that can be accessed, assembled, traversed, and that fashioning memory is a practice in constructing the shape of time. And time, in Carter’s hands, becomes as solid as a wall and as strong as bone. 

Exhibition text by Britt Camm