Karen Carson

American, b. 1943

Illumination
1989

Acrylic and gouache on paper
25 x 28.625 x 2 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
1996.75

Though originally a painter, Carson has experimented with a variety of materials and methods such as collage, fabric, light boxes, and large installations. Her body of work is notable for its constant and dramatic changes in style and subject matter, a quality that some critics have said caused her to be overlooked by major art institutions in the United States. Carson’s work has gone between abstraction and figure painting, but is consistent in representing the changes that Carson observes in both nature and culture. Carson has said that many viewers believe her works are satire, but she actually sees them as literal and serious expressions of the spiritual commotion of her daily life.

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This object has the following keywords:

• abstract - Genre of visual arts in which figurative subjects or other forms are simplified or changed in their representation so that they do not portray a recognizable person, object, thing, etc.; may reference an idea, quality, or state rather than a concrete object. For the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances, prefer "abstraction." For 20th-century art styles that were a reaction against the traditional European conception of art as the imitation of nature, use "Abstract (fine arts style)."
• candle
• light bulbs - Bulb-shaped dilatations of glass tubes used as the container of an incandescent filament or fourescent light, typically placed in a fixture or lamp that is connected to electricity.
• Moon
• sun

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

• Collecting on the Edge Part I , 9/15/2018 - 12/15/2018
• Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction , 8/25/2020 - 7/9/2022

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