"The Power of Negative Thinking," by Doug Harvey of L.A. Weekly
"Artists are comfortable with negativity. It's why they wear black and continue to smoke."
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.
"Let's Face the Music and Dance" consists of more than a dozen rectangles of paint-encrusted linen and paper: panoramic vistas of sunsets, gathering storms, explosions and other pathetic fallacies, acting as backdrops for a bewildering array of dancing silhouettes — swing couples, Martha Graham types, chorus lines and tap. Smaller vistas are framed with weirdly exaggerated decorative frames, hand-painted with monochromatic wood-grain patterns. Like much of the best art, Carson's work operates in the negative space of good taste, and though her current parameters may seem like those of conventional painting, she repeatedly and provocatively flouts upscale international-style decorator etiquette. And it ain't just them frames.
Carson's handling of paint is masterful but dredges up a moment in proletarian decorative arts when the gestural flourishes — the drips and spatters of abstract expressionism — were put in the service of a jazzily stylized pictorialism. At the opening, I observed several artists visibly discomfited by this work, literally unable to look at something so fundamentally wrong according to the tenets of contemporary art history. It is these concealed, visually encoded, cultural reflex buttons for which Carson consistently probes. Similarly, the emotional exaggeration and overt sentimentality of the imagery and palette are on the one hand exquisitely inflammatory, on the other profound and heartfelt. Balancing a hyperdecorative visual vocabulary laced with high-art no-no's, badass formalist chops (including a formidable command of illusionistic space), and ominous — though joyous and funny — ruminations on death, disaster and human frailty, Carson manages to make the end of the world look like the dawn of a brand-new day. And if that's not negative, I don't know what is.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release
March, 2010.
Let's Face the Music and Dance
Karen Carson presents a new body of work, comprised of paintings on linen and paper with huge brooding skies and long deep horizons. In the vein of her series of fires, horses, and winds, these new skies hover above landscapes populated with the silhouettes of dancers.
In these paintings there are many people engaged with many different types of dance, performance and actions. Carson employs her superb painting technique to deftly activate the figures and the skies. The people are waltzing, two stepping, break dancing, jumping, running and embracing. From the most loving and romantic gestures to ecstatic and violent ones, these people are expressing a spectrum of emotions as big as the skies above them. They seem to come from diverse sources like classic movies and entertainment, and also cults and strange communities. Couples attract and repel each other, just as the skies’ furious swirls and gusts attempt to push and repel the figures below.
These are paintings filled with the exuberance and anxiety of weather. At times putting us under assault and at other times in complete awe – nature figures heavily in this work. Carson’s technique moves her figures and weather as expressively as she moves her brush.
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Karen Carson at Rosamund Felsen by Michael Duncan for Art in America
Karen Carson's awesome, joyous, hilarious paintings of Pegasus-filled skies are virtuosic testaments to her medium and the culmination of several bodies of work made since she began spending part of each year in Big Timber, Mont. After series devoted to waterfalls, fires and windstorms, the L.A. painter has turned to invisible forces that are just as cantankerous, free-spirited and beyond mankind's control. In quick acrylic strokes on Tycore board, Carson spills out gargantuan winged horses scurrying through the sky, her gestural marks describing skirmishes, gallops and the fluttering of wings. Down on earth, in the foreground, spectators go about thier business in black silhouette, blind to the delirious action above. Carson's paintings are allegories of the current state of a visual culture numb to spirit and obvious to the glorious stimulation of paint.
Though flying horses might seem the corniest of tropes, the work seems to triumph through a masterful, passionate technique. The imagery rises out of energetic, Pollack-like fields made up of a cacophony of brushstrokes. Executed with the freehand verve of Tiepolo, the lively horses are seen from front and behind, a la Uccello. In Horsepower II (2006), Two white steeds gallop in front of two others emerging from a black sky in swirls of red, pink and white. Horsepower IV (2007) is a frenzy of wintry actionin whirls of white, violet, and blue. One bucking horse seems to kick a tree in the landscape through which zombielike humans stroll.
Immediately surrounding the painting is a thin white frame, and around it, separated by a black border, a second frame of deep hues, setting off the fireworks within. The stark framing also serves to accentuate the contrast of gestural skies and stolid silhouettes. The disconnectbetween heaven and earth is Carson's grand tragicomic theme, presented here as a kind of operatic shadow play. She continues to explode the simplistic ironies and subterfuges that have made so much contemporary art seem trivial and inconsequential. These luminescent works transend Ab-Ex ego trips, postmodern image glut and decorator minimalism to capture the vitality and power just beyond our ken. The skies are alive if we look.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, Ride the Wind, 2007
For her upcoming show, Karen Carson presents new paintings in acrylic on wood-framed tycore panels, accompanied by a selection of framed large-scale studies in acrylic on paper. Spending half the year on a ranch in Montana, where almost every painting is a wild-west cliché, Carson swore that she would never paint horses. Perhaps it was just a matter of time. Now, with all of the dripping sensuality of gestural abstraction, winged horses descend like a firestorm on wooded, rural landscapes, populated by the hauntingly blasé black silhouettes of oblivious urbanites. As much a biting commentary on the myopia of urban cosmopolitanism as a battle of painterly clichés, it is a testament to the depth and intensity of her commitment to painting that Carson can rend the torrential complexities of the world as deftly from the fury of expressionism as from the blankness of silhouette.
In the third gallery will be works from her previous series of landscapes inspired by the wind, including a large scale, two-panel painting in silk dye and acrylic on silk, titled Currents, as well as several studies in watercolor on paper.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. April 28, 2007 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Edward Sterrett at 310.828.8488
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Karen Carson at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
Christopher Miles
Art Forum
November 2001
pp. 150 – 51
Leave it to Karen Carson to pay homage to Cézanne’s landscapes in a format usually reserved for promoting the latest twelve-pack special. Carson, who has named paintings after Disney songs and created abstract images based on Renaissance theories of composition, constructed “Landscape After Cézanne (2000), by layering cut-out, drawn-on sheets of colored transparent vinyl over a framed light box, whose fluorescent tubes are themselves wrapped in colored gels to maximize the diffusion and variety of light and hue. The brilliant result appeals to the side of oneself that still admires a good black-light poster while also appealing to the side that admires a solid exercise in color and composition.
“Landscape After Cézanne” is one of eight light-box works offering a survey of land- and seascape themes in the gallery’s darkened back room. As eye-candyish as they are, as eyesore-ish as they flirt with becoming, “Mountain Lake with Reflection” (2000), “Ocean with Pink Cloud” (2001) and “Desert” (2000) – yes, the titles are that syrupy – effectively transported me to odd combinations of place I’ve been and known – both in real life and in daydreams and fantasies, channeled through a variety of culture and media conduits. “Waterfall with Music Notes” (2000), with its cartoony fragments of quarter and eighth notes dancing over a cascading torrent, virtually sings. “Forest Fire” (2000), which takes full advantage of the medium’s capacity to deliver a range of hot lights and smoldering darks, might bring on bad Bambi flashbacks, but it also solicits a shiver of the sublime, and is as good an example of awesome-nature Romanticism as any.
The gallery’s main rooms, strewn with Oriental carpets, became a salon lined with paintings of paintings: dramatically unfurling banners carrying landscapes rendered in a sign painter’s shorthand appeared on – what else? – vinyl banners. These pictures offered another thematic sampler, with two versions of the musical falls motif and nineteen paintings combining variables of river, big sky, waterfall, mountain, desert, and assorted flora, all twisting, bending and flowing to follow their fluid illusionistic grounds.
The gallery’s entry held a single large painting, also on a banner, of a postcard desert marked with words in a wild-west typeface, looking like a movie title that has just leapt to the foreground of the screen. Delivering an elegant pun, they read “MAKING THE SEEN” and provided names for both the piece and the show – going straight to the heart of the matter. On first glance, one might assume these works to be a calculated assault on high sensibilities, but like much of Carson’s output, they simply prod one to get over one’s smirks and get on with the act of viewing, of enjoying the bold results of the artist’s mastery over both high-art composition and low-budget special effects as well as her fearlessness in the face of kitsch.
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Karen Carson at Rosamund Felsen
Michael Duncan
Art in America
April 2002
pp.161-2
Our experience of nature has become so mediated by mini-malls, rest stops and water features that most of us can’t really see the forest or the trees. In her most recent body of work, Karen Carson audaciously takes on the task of presenting nature in a way that is compatible with car-based consumer culture. The unusual mediums she chooses – vinyl banners and colorful lightboxes – are the vehicles of advertising, rededicated to the promotion of natural splendor.
Carson’s 21 brightly hued paintings on vinyl were hung salon-style in a gallery furnished with plastic seating and a complementary-colored array of cheap oriental rugs. The works illusionistically depict landscape paintings in the format of scrolls, quickly drawn with brushy strokes, as if she had recording scenery from a moving car. Most of the portrayed scrolls exhibit ribbonlike folds, standardized in the manner of advertising clip-art. The folds establish complex interior frames that heighten the analytical, theatrical nature of the project.
In “River at Sunset” and “Desert with Stripes” (both 2000), painted folds fragment the scenes with abrupt, animated disjunctions that operate like cinematic jump cuts. This stutter effect emulates the way we usually perceive scenery, moving our eyes from detail to detail, our vision disrupted by passing pedestrians or vehicles. Carson has devised a kind of Cubist twist on traditional Chinese scroll painting, with a nervous energy that reflects our motion-mad time.
In the darkened back gallery, Carson showed eight fluorescent lightboxes featuring landscapes drawn on translucent vinyl layered over cut-out pieces of variously hued vinyl. Exploiting the visceral charge o this ultra-synthetic, light-based presentation, Carson celebrates nature’s often unreal-seeming pyrotechnic effects. In one work, the diamond shape of a mountain and its reflection in a lake glow with an awesome crystalline sheen. The tightly knit sunbursts of color in the tondo “Bouquet” (2001) resemble meteor showers. Most impressively, “Forest Fire” (2000) foreground black tree trunks in front of smoky background conflagration of red, yellow and dusky blue. In these works, the waterfall and mountain scenes commonly used in lightboxes to sell beer induce a different kind of inebriation. With subversive visual punch, Carson reconnects us to a literally illuminated nature.
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 Putting Out Fires Press Release
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
Karen Carson
“Putting Out Fires”
May1—May 29, 2004
For her new show “Putting Out Fires”, Karen Carson deals with the subject of forest fires through the medium of paint and light boxes. From her homes in Montana and California Karen has witnessed first hand the cause and effects of forest fires. Her new body of work confronts the actual and the mythical nature of fire, portraying its ephemeral and terrible beauty.
Heightening the dual nature of fire, Karen has rendered the images on stretched silk. The violence is balanced on a silken thread as the frantic calligraphic marks fight to free themselves from the gossamer silk. These struggles charge the pictoral space with dynamic contrasts of epic battles between fire and all that meet its path.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on May 1, 2004 from 5—7pm. Gallery hours are 10—5:30, Tuesday—Saturday. For more information please contact Justin Boyd at 310.828.8488
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