Long, an artist in mid-career, is best known for his collaborative works with the British pop band Stereolab, which revived 1960s electronic music.

From 1995 to 2000, he worked with the band to produce interactive, audio-sculptural installations. These included The Amorphous Body Study Center, in which viewers participated by wearing headphones connected to objects such as couches and cushions and listening to the dreamy, mantra-rock melodies of Stereolab.

Since 2003, Long has returned to his early focus on immobile, abstracted sculptural objects and assemblages that combine found objects, debris and materials such as plaster, steel and papier-mâché.

SITE Director/Curator Laura Steward Heon stated, “Charles Long is an incredibly talented artist who combines delicacy with conceptual rigor, and it is my pleasure to host his work at SITE. For me, the thrill of his work is in its detail, which has a fantastic lyrical quality.”

In his earlier work, amorphous and organic, blob-like shapes made of soft materials such as clay, rubber and plastic were evocative of skin and flesh. In this recent body of work, the large and often bizarre skeletal structures are more reminiscent of magical, polymorphous creatures such as talismans or totem poles.

His former focus was on the bodily awareness, sensorial pleasure and interactivity of subject-object. Now the focus is on the solitary object – suggestive of human solitude and vulnerability – and on the autonomous status of the artwork.

More Like a Dream Than a Scheme features this recent body of work. The exhibition is comprised of some 25 free-standing assemblage sculptures and 10 lamp-like objects hung from the ceiling and walls.

The exhibition is organized by The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.

The artist currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California–Riverside. Born in Long Branch, N.J., in 1958, he holds a B.F.A. from Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. from Yale University. Long has shown his work regularly with the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York and the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. He recently had a solo show at California’s Orange County Museum of Art, and he has participated in group exhibitions in Japan, Australia, Sweden and various U.S. venues.

There is a 42-page exhibition catalogue features 24 color illustrations, along with essays by curator Vesela Sretenovic, art critic Gregory Volk, and a conversation with the artist.