http://www.asyageisberggallery.com/exhibitions/carolyn-case2/installation-views?view=slider#4

Asya Geisberg Gallery is proud to present "Homemade Tattoo", the second solo painting exhibition of Carolyn Case. Moving to a larger scale, the artist confounds expectations of expansiveness by covering discordant ways of painting with a skim of detailed dots, patterned veils, and washes, evoking textile, lace or aboriginal mark-making. Case’s work relies on a beguiling density applied from years of working and reworking a surface, and the constant push and pull of trying to gauge an articulated space out of a selection of suggestions.  A leaf or a palm frond, a bisected jug, a coffee cup stain, or notebook paper page might come and go out of the diversity of painting approaches, sneaking in a familiar association of comfort and ubiquity. Each work implies a stunning resolve to erase and redo, coating areas in so many overlapping drips,scrapes, brush marks and dabs. And yet that workmanship interplays with the bravado of mechanical erasure – what took years to produce can be sanded away in mere seconds.

This wistful sincerity and simultaneous playfulness finds a fitting motif in the show’s title, “Homemade Tattoo”. A vision of earnest teenagers trying to carve a message they may soon outgrow confounds the expectation that tattoos are meant to last forever. Where before the dots in Case’s paintings could imply embroidery, doodling, or meditative abstraction, now we see skin itself present as a similar surface for an image constructed of sequential tiny dots. The body becomes a playground for aesthetic overhaul, but unlike a painting, we are only given one chance to get it right.

For Case, sanding acts as a metaphor for starting over and making new choices. The frequent motif of notebook paper acts as a fragile formal device where blue lines create an Agnes-Martin like pattern, as well as a suggestion of trying hard in school to get it right. Upon closer looking, one sees an awkward mirroring– as drips are hand-painted in a Rorschach-like repetition. Case titles her paintings after the myriad of influences of any one seemingly abstract gesture – the colors of her high school, the arrangement of knick-knacks in a home, the porousness of time, and the effort required as daily mundane tasks, repeated over the years, add up to the building of a life. In the bewildering complexity of Case’s paintings, small repeated gestures crescendo towards a hard-fought equilibrium, much as we try to steer our lives, in increments large and small, towards a larger meaning.

After travelling to Japan, Iran, and India, I was heavily influenced by Japanese Screens, as well as Persian and Indian Miniature Painting. I was especially drawn to the use of space and the lush environments where time seems to stop. Prior to my current work, I was working through these influences by painting imagined landscapes. While working on the landscapes, I also became interested in Andean weaving (pre and post colonial era) and Persian carpets. In these, I was drawn to the vibrancy and freshness of the colors, the complexity of the patterns, and the palpable vibration of this combination. This is why I developed the current technique of using crisscrossing patterns of paint and drips of paint that are laden with tiny dots of colors. These layers are then painted over and sanded, often embedding the dots of paint. I felt that I was starting to recreate what I was drawn to in the weavings, while hopefully still retaining fragments of the imagined world of the Eastern art that originally swayed me.
Recently, I have studied the African American quilting tradition and have been impressed by the abstract aesthetic these quilts embody. I am attracted to the element of surprise in the compositions, which are largely the product of repetitive labor. Likewise, my work is labor intensive and has kept some of the compositional elements of landscape, but is now creating a world through a process that combines spontaneity and repetition. It is my hope that the painting will transcend the sum of its parts to again suggest a place that is lush and mysterious. This mimics lifeâ??s daily tasks that can give way to something revelatory. This is how I relate to my own process of painting: tedious labor of tiny dots and drips and sanding and painting, and this feels like home.

Work from last year

oil paintings on panel