Archive Project 25: Karen Carson

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Karen Carson Home Page | Spring 2005 Archive

The Project Series
Project 25: Karen Carson

Karen Carson creates paintings and drawings that mine the conceptual and emotional terrain of popular culture. It is territory she has explored for over three decades. For Carson, style has always been at the service of the ideas she is exploring and her work encompasses a wide range of media, including process-oriented “zipper” pieces of the early 1970s; abstract cubist-derived investigations of painterly space in the 1980s; large-scale Las Vegas-inspired vinyl banners of the 1990s; and gestural and graphic depictions of landscapes and fires. Carson transmutes popular culture and art historical references through dynamic graphics, vibrant colors, and poetic texts, into personal, idiosyncratic, statements.

“Hallmark meets Harley-Davidson,” is the way Carson summarized a body of work in a 2001 article by Bernard Cooper for Los Angeles Magazine. Cooper described the 1990s work as “a collision of emotional extremes” in which she deftly combines kitsch iconography—chipmunks, dragons, candy canes, flowers, skull and crossbones. During a visiting artist residency in Las Vegas, Carson determined to make art that could “penetrate the psyche in an instant” and began to incorporate advertising slogans and techniques. The resulting painted vinyl banners conflated her interests in advertising with text, material, and emotionally charged content.

Karen Carson Double Dragon Fire. 2004 Silk dye, acrylic, metallic textile paint on silk. 55” x 14’ 2” (2 panels). Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio

In 1999 Carson began to live in Montana for half of every year and her work integrated that experience. She painted highly stylized images of nature—waterfalls, deserts, mountains—on banners and on light boxes. In this work, Carson tackled the representation of “nature” as a manifestation of the sublime seen by a fast-paced, technological, consumerist culture.

In the work on view here, Carson depicts the emotional and elemental effects of forest fires. The paintings and light boxes stem from a year in which wildfires ravaged the West and came within twenty miles of Carson’s Montana home. In the firestorms, the power of nature became perilously real, as it revealed itself to be even more transcendent and primal. The fire paintings, executed on transparent silk in fabric dyes and acrylic and metallic washes and on layered, transparent Plexiglas light boxes, are correspondingly more personal and mythical than the earlier landscapes. They continue the trajectory of her prior work in their focus on conceptual issues of painting, psychological content, and forces in popular culture. Carson presents the fire paintings in an installation that alludes to 19th-century Victorian theatricalism, a strategy that heightens the kitsch factor as it references the Romantic landscape tradition. By including references to popular culture and the canon of art history, she extends the discourse of post-modernism, energizing it with simultaneously profound and playful content.

Karen Carson’s exhibition is the twenty-fifth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator