Carter Flachbarth’s Tales from the Freezer

April 3-May 2, 2026
Hyde Park location

For the show Tales from the Freezer at Martha’s Hyde Park, Carter Flachbarth presents ten new works inspired by the state of pastiche in the twenty-first century. Flachbarth begins from Heidegger’s concept of thrownness, the idea of humans being thrown into a given situation from birth—a certain family, a certain culture, a certain century—that sets up the conditions for their being-in-the-world. But the artist calls into question the validity of this theory, first introduced in Heidegger’s 1927 Sein und Zeit (translated into English as Being and Time in 1962), in the early twenty-first century. 

With the advent of the internet—and even more so with the proliferation of smartphones and social media—one’s thrownness has become less defining. Prior to streaming, or even home media, one’s visual culture was determined by what movies were showing in theatres, what TV shows were airing live. Now, we have almost the entirety of human audiovisual production (lost media notwithstanding) available at all times. Each one of us is now born with the responsibilities of an archivist, a historian, an archaeologist, simply to come up with who we “are.” As Flachbarth states, “We are beset with the paradoxical task of finding our singular authentic selves in an era of infinite information. Time and culture no longer feel like rays travelling along the X and Y axes; they have become decoupled from gravity, floating around us and ordering themselves at random.” 

Flachbarth communicates this conundrum with a combination of allusion and pastiche, marrying different references together, alongside elements from his everyday personal life, into seamless compositions. His paintings ask: Where do we draw the line between a life lived and a life consumed? He adds one more question to the mix: And what about a life consumed and a life produced? 

In 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term “prosumption,” a portmanteau of “production” and “consumption,” to define the individual’s economic condition in the then-coming twenty-first century. It is an unavoidable position today: We produce data with every image we consume online, each of us accompanied by a digital avatar of preferences and networks, even without our knowledge. 

Flachbarth illustrates this situation in a way that feels ambivalent, neither laudatory nor shaming of our position in a media-saturated world. He takes the opportunity to draw equally from film (from Fellini and Herzog to lesser-known directors), fine arts (Andrew Wyeth and Albrecht Dürer both make appearances), and real life (his partner Avery inspires many of the gestures in his work). The result is what the artist, borrowing from director Roy Andersson, calls “freezing”—his paintings have the quality of a film still, taken out of time; yet, unlike the film still, there are no scenes before or after from which to understand the narrative. Dürer, Fellini, Linda Fiorentino, a new towel in Flachbarth’s home all sit together, out of time, out of place. 

In Tales from the Freezer, vision persists, its images remaining on the optical nerve, appearing on the back of the eyelid for a flash, and a single frame freezes into a still.

Tales from the Freezer's opening reception will be held from 6:00 to 9:00 PM on April 3, 2026, and will be on view through May 2, 2026, Friday-Saturday 12-6 PM, or by appointment. 

Text by Grace Sparapani