Nationality American Books Heaven West | Known for Modernism | |
Born 1953 New York, New York Education University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Chicago | ||
JoAnne Carson (b. 1953), is an American artist and State University of New York professor who resides in Brooklyn, New York and Shoreham, Vermont. She is known for her quirky, serio-comic works in painting, sculpture and assemblage all of which contain an exuberant, over-the-top form sensibility and a surrealist hybridity that happily mixes sources and categories. She is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.
Contents
Work
Shortly after graduate school Carson began to make large, three-dimensional paintings of constructed and found objects. The painted elements interacted with the sculptural form as a sort of camouflage; gutted televisions, wooden chairs, and vintage curtains provided a substrate for the painting. These works were widely exhibited and received considerable attention including a Prix de Rome, two solo museum exhibitions in Chicago and Fort Worth, and inclusion in the 1985 Whitney Biennial. Dan Cameron’s 1984 review in Art News describes her as “a painter of formidable technique, whose extraordinary painted constructions are kaleidoscopic assemblages chock full of trompe-l’oeil painting, art-history quips, found objects and nostalgic echoes of early modernism.”
Over the next fifteen years her work became increasingly sculptural until in 2000 it became stand-alone, full blown sculpture. In 2001 she had a one-person exhibition at Plus Ultra Gallery in Brooklyn of a single work, Bouquet, a nine-foot high, blue sculpture depicting a bouquet of non-normative flowers. Roberta Smith, in her New York Times review of the show wrote: “ (this work) is the culmination of methodical progress -- from painting to painted relief to painted wall sculptures – into three dimensions. More than ever before, Ms. Carson seems to be in her element.” She exhibited these works extensively including at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Brooklyn Museum, and the National Academy Museum.
Her focus during the last few years has moved back to painting, pictorially expanding on the world that her sculptures inhabited. The paintings portray animated and abstracted flower forms that suggest narrative dramas in which plants take on the role of an ersatz human. The paintings offer the viewer a portal into a universe of alternative biology and psychological spectacle.
In 2001, the New York Times reviewed her work.