Karen Carson

“In a photograph taken in 1972, a young Karen Carson is caught in the process of composing one of the several possible configurations of a large wall piece constructed of zippers and bold triangulate shapes of white and black cloth. She had recently received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and, in an auspicious debut, had shown an installation of the Zipper pieces at the Long Beach Museum of Art and a walk-in environmental work at the Brand Library in Glendale.

The Zippers were smart, ambitious work for a recent graduate. Providing viewers the opportunity to make and alter various configurations, they established a literal experience of shifting planes. To this cubist underpinning, Carson brought a mix of contemporary postminimalist concerns: viewer participation, chance processes, the consequences of gravity, a fusion of conceptual simplicity and perceptual complexity, and the surprise of soft constructions, common materials, and domestic sewing techniques. Carson thought of them as “soft Donald Judds” – and as “toys” and “game pieces.” But, for all of their strategic shrewdness, the intrigue of the Zippers lies in their underlying emotionality. They suggest a risky engagement with a high-strung aesthetic enticement to turn pictorial space inside out, although the surreal sense of jeopardy or entrapment is more evident in hindsight than it was at the time the Zippers were made. Carson, after all, soon retreated from the potentially messy center and began her rigorous analysis of the language of space. The Zippers announced her adventure as both a complex formal investigation and a search for her own space – for resituating her emotional self in the center of her art.”

-Anne Ayres, from the catalog essay for the exhibition But Enough About Me, 1996.