Celebration
July 9 – September 1, 2016
Karen Carson was born in Corvallis, OR, received her B.A. in 1966 from the University of Oregon and her M.F.A. from UCLA in 1971. In 1994 she was an artist in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She began exhibiting in 1969 at the Atheneum Gallery, CalTech, Pasadena and Cirrus Gallery in 1973-1977. She first exhibited at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in 1979 and continues to the present. A 25 Year Survey of her paintings was held at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1996. She has exhibited at the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series; an exhibition, “Movers and Shapers: Combines, Tractors and Swathers by Karen Carson,” at Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater; and “Canvas Constructions: Karen Carson and Allan McCollum,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at San Diego Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Art; Pasadena Art Museum; The Art Institute of Chicago; Lang Art Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art; Newport Harbor Art Museum; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Fort Worth Art Museum; Brooke Alexander, NY; McNay Institute, San Antonio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Fisher Gallery, USC; Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo and Tsukashin Hall, Osaka; Bill Maynes Gallery, NY; Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria and numerous others.
Carson was a tenured assistant professor at CalState Northridge; a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, Otis College of Art & Design, Claremont Graduate School, UCLA, UC Irvine, and University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and a tenured Assoc. Professor at UC Santa Barbara. She has received numerous awards including Young Talent Award from LA Municipal Art Gallery; Purchase Awards from Western Washington College, Bellingham, Long Beach Museum of Art, and Mt San Antonio College; Mitchell Gallery, and Southern IIllinois University at Carbondale. She has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Painting Fellowship, an NEA grant, the J. Paul Getty Trust Fellowship, and a Research grant from UC Santa Barbara. Carson lives in Venice, CA and Big Timber, Montana.
Artist Website: www.karencarsonartist.com
By Jody Zellen
Huge gestural paintings of tractors fill the gallery walls with energy and passion in Karen Carson's latest show. The subjects, mundane machinery usually driven by men, are transformed into brilliant meditations on landscape and culture. Although Los Angeles based, Carson spends ample time in Montana and it is there where she not only takes in the vast landscape but also encounters tractors. To Carson's eye, a tractor is not merely a tractor. It's an imposing vehicle, an economic and cultural reality and something that must be looked up to, the more so when it is painted in basic primary colors.
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By John Bradenburg
STILLWATER — They’re aren’t many subtleties, and that’s a good thing, about the large, loosely gestural acrylic paintings of farm machines in Karen Carson’s “Movers and Shapers: Combines, Tractors and Swathers” exhibit at the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art.
The 13 mural-sized works, which Carson jokingly calls “my big boyfriends,” are in several rooms of the Postal Plaza Gallery at the museum.
The Los Angeles artist presents these gargantuan machines “from a female point of view as humorous portraits of masculine vanity,” a gallery spokesman said.
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by Eve Wood
Karen Carson has a tremendous sense of humor, as is evidenced in her most recent exhibition at Rosamund Felsen. Having chosen farming equipment—most prominently, tractors—as her subject matter, Carson revels in the sheer monumentality and vibrant colors of these exquisite forms. Whoever would have thought tractors could be so compelling?
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by David Pagel
By the time Monet got around to painting pictures of haystacks, viewers pretty much knew that his works were not about farming.
All kinds of subjects, including perception, time, workmanship and mortality, as well as paint’s capacity to make and convey meaning, played into the Impressionist’s images of life in the French countryside.
Times have changed — and not for the better.
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By Jody Zellen
In "La Condition Humaine" Karen Carson pushes the conceptual boundaries of image/text juxtaposition by offering large banner-like paintings with kitschy type situated above and below loosely rendered yet enigmatic faces. In these works, she combines the gesticulation of an expressionistic application of paint with the funkiness of circus banner typography and the verbal acuity of advertising slogans. The 26 un-stretched works on canvas are push-pinned to the walls. Each work boldly asserts a two-word pairing that at first glance seems obvious, but upon meditation, especially in relation to Carson's images, resonates on multiple levels.
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by Doug Harvey
One artist who manages a remarkable tightrope balance with many levels of negativity — while always managing to surprise — is painter Karen Carson, whose work has ranged from minimalist geometric fabric "paintings" (with zippers allowing reconfiguration) to baroque, mirror-studded, cobbled-together architectonic abstract explosions; shaped-canvas cubist bouquets of decorative-clock flowers or stealth-bomber/vulture hybrids; vinyl banners combining Las Vegas gaming design with stripped-down Buddhist aphorisms; and backlit bar-style light boxes depicting raging forest fires. Her latest body of work continues her recent exploration of strategies like rectangular surfaces covered entirely with paint, constituting an image of a landscape. For Carson, that's pretty far out.
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