Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang at The Polygon Gallery

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang

The Polygon Gallery

Nov. 28, 2025 – Mar. 29, 2026

By EA Douglas

Busting off the walls ready to steal your attention, the works included in Charlotte Zhang’s Tireslashers at The Polygon Gallery are bright, bold, and confronting. Uniting two of Zhang’s ongoing projects, Rogue Pamphlets, a series of large textile collages, and Bloodsport/Playground Rules, a handpicked selection of “readymade” sculptures lifted from public property, the exhibit brings under scrutiny the historical and contemporary construct of the loveable outlaw.

The hand-sewn wall hangings of Rogue Pamphlets are composed of images of ruffians and rogues, pulled from historical and contemporary sources, and transferred onto shiny, polyester patches, using the sublimation dye technique. The pictures have been carefully cut out, then basted with large, loose stitches, one on top of another, piled up to the point of convergence. The Rogue Pamphlets seem to play with the act of installation: the tension of the backing fabrics held against the gallery walls causes the images to ripple and pucker, the brightness of the lighting bouncing against the polyester sheen, further distorting the pictures. The visual impact is stunning.

Romance Scammers (Gyges – Lyndon) is the largest and most impressive piece of the group. The work juxtaposes the naked Nyssia from William Etty’s Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed (1830) with a rising Lady Columbia, the female personification of the United States. Various versions of these historical heroines are stitched onto two blue stretches of fabric, interspersed with images pulled from surveillance cameras of pickpockets, and foregrounded by a film still of a just-about-to-happen kiss from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). The assemblage brings together seducers, rakes, gold diggers, and America’s self-concept of nationhood, forcing the question of similitude.

The other standouts are Evasive Theatrics I (Irma Vep, the malevolent Other) and Evasive Theatrics II (Executioners and interrogated subjects), a duo of laser lemon yellow squares highlighting the roles of the femme fatale and the executioner, in turn, exploring the commonality of characters donning masks. Evasive Theatrics I (Irma Vep, the malevolent Other) features women’s bodies in black latex, reduced to only their eyes, with a snarling Musidora, pulled from Louis Feuillade’s seven-hour Les Vampires (1915-16), taking front stage. Each corner is labelled with an attribution of this character, top-to-bottom, left-to-right they read: HOSTILE, FLIRTATIOUS, APOLOGIZING, FANTASIZING. Its counterpart, Evasive Theatrics II (Executioners and interrogated subjects) centers an eerie, blurred-selfie-like image of a gloating criminal, overtop which, blood sprays from a freshly decapitated body, below grinning reapers from The Purge (2013) eyelessly confront the viewer, the labelling reads: ACCUSING, DISPIRITED, JOKING, ARROGANT. Together, these two works illuminate the double-sidedness of these social constructs, how both characters are caricatured as villains while simultaneously being glorified as heroes.

Furthering this concept of duality are the inclusion of the pieces from Zhang’s Bloodsport/Playground Rules series. Assembled across two low, bench-like plinths are thirteen metal arches in deep shades of phthalo green and navy blue. Smooth, shiny, sometimes marked with graffiti, these curved metal crests have, in some cases, been loosely locked together in pairs, or they stand solo, upright like the humps of a sea monster, or lay on their sides showing off spikey screws. It’s the screws that allude to the sculptures’ origins, with them the colourful Bondo crests were once affixed to the bus benches around L.A. A form of hostile architecture familiar to most metropolitans, to the point it has become normalized, under the guise of decoration, these simple curves of metal are a brutal way to keep people from sleeping in public spaces.  The “readymade” sculptures of Bloodsport/Playground Rules may look simple, but the affect of their inclusion in Tireslashers is distinct. Through the destruction of public property, Zhang has aligned herself with the glorified petty criminals who line the walls. Subsequently, by exhibiting these works, the art institution is thrown under the same level of scrutiny as the various entities explored in the Rogue Pamphlets series. In presenting this exhibition, the gallery has not only sanctified acts against the status quo of hostile architecture, but it has also become complicit in the crime. By placing these bench dividers on, albeit short, pedestals, the exhibition uplifts the yield of vandals’ exploits and, in turn, the acts of vandalism themselves. In doing so, the institution embodies the question that Zhang has been asking within her wall-bound pieces: who decides who is the hero and who is the villain?

The colourful works included in Tireslashers give the show the demeanour of childish playfulness while confronting serious concerns of the contemporary art audience. By pulling into parallel pieces from both Bloodsport/Playground Rules and Rogue Pamphlets, The Polygon Gallery forces us to see the picture bigger than the individual works themselves.