Theater of the eye - paintings, drawings and other works, Karen Carson, various galleries, Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California

Art in America, Nov, 1996 by Michael Duncan

The subject of a recent 25-year retrospective, Los Angeles painter Karen Carson uses complex spatial compositions and wide-ranging pop cultural references to fashion a vivid imaginative world.

"But Enough About Me," the three-venue retrospective of Los Angeles artist Karen Carson, surprised even Carson's most avid supporters with its satisfying synthesis of her wildly varied output. In paintings, drawings, banners and installations made over the past 25 years, Carson has changed directions repeatedly, moving from abstraction to feminist iconography to works with highly charged spiritual references. This survey, however, made evident the consistency of Carson's vision. Whether using symbols, caricature or even illusionistic space, her works hook viewers into an urgent engagement with the world at large.

Employing a multi-institutional format, curator Anne Ayers presented a melange of Carson's works, old and new, at the gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design; a chronological survey of works at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which included the lesser-known early works on paper; and a re-creation of Carson's 1992 installation of painted globes at LACE. A concurrent exhibition of recent drawings and a small survey of works on paper at Rosamund Felsen Gallery provided yet another angle on the artist's multifaceted production.

Carson has always seemed both one step ahead and one step outside of the rest of the art world. Confronting social and artworld trends rather than simply reflecting them, her work leaps beyond one's expectations into willfully unsettling formal and autobiographical terrain. Although Carson was overlooked for inclusion in MOCA's 1992 exhibition of L.A.-based artists, "Helter Skelter," her drawings of that year using tattoo iconography would effortlessly have fit in with the apocalyptic themes and bad-boy humor of Paul McCarthy, Llyn Foulkes, Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon. At Otis, a large wall filled with these ominous works on paper--often collaged with cartoon fragments from greeting cards and advertisements--bombarded the viewer with an array of tiny gun-toting clowns, threatened babies and heavy-metal skulls, all partially obscured by unsettlingly murky sheets of dark green or red Plexiglas.

Carson has also been left out of most surveys of feminist art, despite the fact that her large shaped panel paintings of 1990-91 explicitly and exhaustively explore the parameters of that movement. Decorated with mirror shards, ticking clocks, spiders, hearts, devils and hormone-labeled ribbons, these paintings examine the explosive contradictions felt by a woman in her mid-40s. With their comic, confessional flair, such works go far beyond the range of Judy Chicago or even Harmony Hammond.

Carson's is an intensely personal art that has focused on the particularly thorny issues of sexual relationships, promiscuity, menopause and mortality. Her work challenges our society's prevailing youth cult, slyly advocating adulthood as a preferable state. In Butterflies Are Free to Burn (1989), jagged, concentric star bursts--suggesting fragments of an exploded cocoon--emanate from a murky central core. Fiery colors dominate at the outer rim of these forms, indicating growth from a larval stage to fully decorated selfhood. Completing the metaphor, a resplendent butterfly takes off from the painting's upper left corner. The nearly 10-foot-high Flowers of Fate (1990-91) is an over-the-top vanitas painting; it depicts a bouquet of ticking clocks ornamented with angular petals and mirrored frames.

Perhaps the climax of this series, the 1991 Phoenix and the Ovaries (shown at the Santa Monica Museum) is an 8-foot-tall fanshaped panel on the theme of menopause. Placed at its center is a suburban-baroque convex mirror which rises transfigured on a gigantic arrow, accompanied by two illuminated phoenixes. Embellished with painted knives, flames, lightning bolts and mirror fragments, the work is a comic, bittersweet ode to sexuality. Carson's fan is a device to cool any incipient hot flash, a decorated balm to soothe meditations on a taboo topic.

The sincerity of these paintings is balanced by the deadpan humor of their cartoony style. Carson grounds her work in a simple yet sophisticated sentiment that cuts through expected psychological, feminist and art-world poses. Employing complexly organized visual forms, she presents her loose allegories with a forthrightness and a go-for-broke symbolism unimaginable in other figuratively based abstract painters--Susan Rothenberg, Ross Bleckner or Elizabeth Murray, say.

In his catalogue essay, critic Dave Hickey refers to the "shameless veracity" of Carson's work and her penchant for reminding us that "we all live Jane Austen lives with Dostoyevsky aspirations." That mixture of the genteel and the gutsy gives Carson's work its knowing, ironic balance, one that is underscored by her sense of visual theatricality. Carson's notion of theater was first evident in her play with spatial illusion. Her earliest works, the "Zipper" pieces (1972), were made just after she graduated from UCLA. These zipped-together geometric sections of canvas are interactive works, intended to be altered by viewers into a variety of floppy, extended or taut forms. Turning geometric abstraction into a kind of striptease, Carson literally opens up the picture's surface.