Black & White Gallery/Project Space is pleased to present JoAnne Carson, Dreamcatchers, a solo exhibition devoted to the
artist’s recent paintings that envision a world of animated and abstracted flower forms – equal parts Cubism and Looney Tunes
and sculpture that shares similar pictorial sensibility: a love of the serio-comic, a delight with pattern and intense color, as well as
a surrealist hybridity that happily mixes sources and categories. Dreamcatchers offers the viewer a portal into a universe of alternative biology and psychological spectacle.
The artist has stated, “I spent ten years studying the anatomy of flowers and plants, and making hundreds of sculptural parts that riff on that anatomy. I know the botanical construction and visual logic of plants pretty well, experience that gives me the basis for inventing forms in paintings. I often feel that I am painting a picture of an imaginary sculpture that - like my actual sculpture - expresses a character or personage. And I can almost weigh that form in my hands it is so palpable, more object than image in
my imagination.”
“The work's unapologetic decorativeness recalls the late 1970's work of artists like Robert Kushner and Ree Morton. Its fragility and distorted scale give it the giddy beauty of glass flowers or some of Cy Twombly's more attenuated sculptures.”
---Roberta Smith, New York Times, Art in Review, November 9, 2001
About JoAnne Carson
JoAnne Carson is an American artist and State University of New York professor who resides in Brooklyn, NY and Shoreham, VT. She has received numerous notable awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for 2016, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, award in sculpture from the National Academy Museum in New York City, the Louise Bourgeois Residency from Yaddo, and individual artist grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and The Awards in the Visual Arts
Carson’s work can be found in many public collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Fort Worth Art Museum, the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, the Frederick Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. Solo museum exhibitions include The Fort Worth Art Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She has had multiple solo gallery shows in New York and Chicago. Her work has been represented in public group exhibitions most notably in the Whitney Museum Biennial Exhibition, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial Exhibition, The New Orleans Museum, the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
