the carrie art

2011-04-11T18:36:00.004-05:00

Please visit my new website here.

recent work

2010-10-05T15:35:00.000-05:00

The best glimpses of my ongoing work with refugee youth from Burma and TED fellow Naomi Natale are cataloged via my recent residency: Labotanica's School of Latitudes.

http://labotanica.org/latitudes/?author=5

Upcoming works include another guerilla reverse graffiti mural & starting the slow, vulnerable translation of my mom's sickness and death into an expressed healing.

Mural progress

2010-07-20T17:42:00.001-05:00

Mapped mural in progress with each kid's "Old Home/New Home" drawing up where it is in the mural so they can start painting!

Sunblossom

2010-07-10T18:01:00.003-05:00

For the past year I've been volunteering with the kids at Sunblossom apartments. They are refugees from Burma, though many of them were born in refugee camps in Thailand or Malaysia. They are an amazing bunch of kids and bring so much joy to my life. Pictured are some of the art projects we've done together: origami, paper mache masks, summer drawings, enamel pins, batik, and a trip to the MFAH.

Mural projects at Sunblossom:
top & bottom left: Our current mural project is a compilations of all the kid's "Old Home/New Home" entries in the World Refugee Day poster contest. One of Sunblossom's own, Bawi, won for his age group!
bottom right: Mural by Sar Moo Ley of Karen state. Sar Moo Ley is an awesome artist who lives at Sunblossom & whose beautiful oil paintings and extensive writing preserves and celebrates the cultural history of his persecuted people. He hopes to submit them to a museum in Burma in the future when such work would not be ground for imprisonment or execution.

The I

2010-05-28T20:01:00.000-05:00

Christina curates window space at labotanica and calls it "The I...the convergence between labotanica and the greater community." I wanted to prove that point, but saw the window as the physical boundary between the interior of the designated art space and the exterior of the everyday. Inspired by the themes Extended Drawing as an exhibition and experiment, I decided to supply both sides of the window with dry erase markers. Each side of the window was equipped and invited to leave their mark in response and reaction to the other. The project was constantly evolving and expanding throughout the show. Inspired by drawing as raw witness and unmediated communication, the project activates borderspace as a transparent platform for dialog.

Commissioned reversal language by Stuart Harwood. It reads "Draw Here" from both the inside and the outside.

stage exchange

2010-03-11T18:51:00.001-06:00

labotanica became the hub of a participatory message exchange project based on stages of life. The exchange occurs online, on site, and at stage exchange boxes all around Houston. the best way to get a good look at this project is to go to: http://stageexchange.blogspot.com/ ...here's some glimpses

leftover helium tank

2010-02-18T18:56:00.000-06:00

After the "reverse message in a bottle" project below, I still had a rented helium tank about half full. I brought the tank to Sunblossom with three bagfuls of colorful balloons. Loren, Anil, and I blew up balloons and handed them out to all the kids we possibly could in three hours. The feilds and alleys between all the groupings of aparments were filled with floating round colors, kids chasing after them, screaming, clutching, pleading for more. We ran out of full size balloons way before the kids had their fill. We found some miniature balloons the size of apples and stretched them to fit over the tank nozzle. Even filled with helium, their lift just equaled the weight of the balloon material and the yarn. Sometimes we had to tie two or three balloons on one yarn just to lift the weight of it. So they sort of hovered around, neither leading or trailing their holders. I had thought there was no relic of that afternoon, but I found this picture.

Reverse Message in a Bottle

2010-01-18T11:23:00.002-06:00

2010-01-18T11:20:00.001-06:00

2010-01-18T11:09:00.000-06:00

An exploration of authorship, a wind based, time based work, a reverse message in a bottle. Balloons carrying empty scrolls and anchored by pencils were launched to unknown sites and anonymous recipients who are invited by the object to give the work its content.

Who Belongs

2010-01-08T18:20:00.003-06:00

At a busy Houston intersection is a 2 sq city block development of insulated upper class condos. The private company has overtaken the public sidewalk with a fence that hides construction and advertises the type of people they wish to attract. To remind them of who is actually there building it for them every day, I added my own 9' tall silhouettes of construction workers.

2009-10-09T19:01:00.005-05:00

a collaboration with my brilliant poet friend for Elder Street Gallery show

Art Swap

2009-10-05T16:33:00.003-05:00

my little spot at labotanica's art swap #1.

Art Swap, a participatory exhibition in which artists of all media can exchange art with other artists for free. Art Swap centers on reciprocity and re-negotiates value and commerce in art production and presentation. The exhibition examines how art is presented, which artists are presented, what type of art is presented, and who has access to own art. Art Swap is an exhibition in which artists can hang and install their artwork and walk away with another artists' work in their collection. Art is exchanged 1 for 1, irregardless of value, material, or maker.

Describe Something Completely

2009-09-08T23:29:00.000-05:00

Adeetje and I collaborated to describe some people completely. We did this by making an ice cream flavor for each one of them. I hope to find the recipes to upload soon, but here's a little taste:
Spencer: carrot, grass, lemon, green tea, cilantro
Neil: honey nut cheerio milk, vanilla extract, peanut butter, pretzels
Lindsey: cardamom, anise, cinnamon, chai, chocolate chips
Eloise: lavender, chamomile, hibiscus, hyssop, white chocolate covered raisins
Joel: chocolate, coffee grounds, red hots, chili powder
Ben: Ham sandwich

This is how Adeetje describes it: "Ten people are translated into flavors of ice cream and invited to taste each other's identities"
We packed the ice cream in unlabeled pints and made the group taste them all and see if they could guess who was who. They were about 94% accurate.

Unweaving

2009-09-07T23:06:00.005-05:00

I just really wanted to have conversations as art, but I also wanted to pass my fibers class, so I documented my conversations by making a weaving during each conversation, each section aesthetically portraying the nature of the interaction. But of course the loom was too short and the interactions can't really be documented because their effects endlessly evolve, undo, and change me. So to present the work I unwove the weaving and played audio of myself speaking about weaving beliefs and unweaving beliefs, giving up on arriving at a perfected artifact, and constantly becoming instead.

Parallel Universes Show: Art & Physics

2009-08-19T15:50:00.012-05:00

So I received a canvas that I could do anything to, as long as I "preserved the line" that would help complete the collaborative exquisite corpse. I wanted to make that line as precarious as possible, leaving it open to the participation of each person who visited the peice. The other canvas has the same idea, but I wanted to mirror (haha) the tenant found in quantum physics that when observed, particles will change their behavior. Thanks to everyone who drew on my peices and helped make them open, participatory works that changed through time with multiple ideas and authors working on them.

the peice that is not in this show

2009-08-10T17:16:00.005-05:00

This is an animation I did for this show: http://www.artshound.com/event/detail/28303 It begins with the line of the exquisite corpse that I had to preserve. Then I decided to do something else, which I will post soon.

Housewarming

2009-08-09T17:11:00.002-05:00

my friends Indre and Ilianna just moved into a house that Dominique de Menil used to inhabit. They asked us to bring chairs as housewarming gifts, but my trunk was full of 9' silhouettes of construction workers, so I had to make a mini earthwork in their backyard instead.

Theseus Project (2)

2009-07-28T15:45:00.000-05:00

I wrote a poem of memories from a blissful trip I took with my dear friend. The memories were so potent that I kept replaying them in my mind, missing the experience so much I ached. Wanting to release but also honor them, I wrote them and ripped them out, then threaded them onto a thread as I walked a long way through the woods along the bayou. I let each each of the memories go, suspended on the thread between tree or branch or weed, according to the rhythm of the poem. Both the thread and the peices are camoflaged and easy to lose sight of. There's a little video of what it kind of feels like to walk along the poem, but the work is mostly intended for a random passerby, an anonymous audience who may never see it. I'd like to think someone will stumble upon it and follow the thread.

STUCK

2009-07-28T12:59:00.000-05:00

I wanted to make a physical embodiment of a word, and then put it through a process that physically destroys it. The letters are carved out of blocks of salt and placed on the sea shore for the ocean's salt water to wash away.

Story Trading

2009-07-28T02:41:00.000-05:00

My practice of story trading began when I told a story to a friend and asked her to share one with me. I received her story, held it, and then passed it on. I then shared her story in exchange for a story from another person. The practice continues, with the 70th sharer, but with many more stories because lots of sharers tell several stories, and some participants ask to repeat the exchange a little while later. It always changes spaces (in various apartment, campus buildings, curbs) and spans spaces (when stories are traded on the telephone across coasts). It was temporary housed in a closet (pictured) for the MICA Commencement Exhibition, and is now taken up in local cafes where I just sit with a sign that says "Story Trading." I enjoy inviting others to take up the role of the artist, and I enjoy that my role as artist is equal parts listening and saying. Over a sustained time, untrackable in its entirety and only documentable as a fraction of the entire work, the project's only physicality is its gesture of exchange, left as traces in each participant’s experience. I feel strongly that art is a social space where such interaction is possible.

A Self Compassion

2009-07-27T15:33:00.000-05:00

A Self Compassion is a practice and a performance derived from it. As a practice I spoke with to-scale projected images of myself at earlier points in time. I speak to these versions of myselves as they grow up; singing, soothing, warning, screaming- cohering these Carries into who I am now. When other people view this practice it becomes a performance and I amplify messages that are both salient to me as an individual and relatable as common experiences of growing up. My back is to any witnesses who enter the room, only the images face them, and they enter after I’ve begun the interaction. There is no seating and witnesses are free to locate themselves as they wish, self determining their own point of view and relationship to the work.

A Sited Self Compassion

2009-07-27T15:00:00.000-05:00

As the dialog progressed, I wanted to move from the contextlessness of the white room and into the home where I grew up and where the memories addressed in my dialog were formed. In this series, the work can only be witnessed through the photographs which document it.

A Self Compassion: Rewritten Voice and Repeated Physiognomy

2009-07-27T14:30:00.001-05:00

The work continued in two practices documented by videos. The first, Rewritten Voice, was retracing my own handwriting from pages of my old journals. I had spent so long speaking to my younger self, I wanted to spend time and care hearing her. The second, Repeated Physiognomy, was a gesture of the mending and merger of myself with my younger selves.

Here is one example of how the series has been exhibited:

Scripted Past

2009-07-22T02:36:00.000-05:00

My long time friend Frank and I collaborated on this work. Using an instant message conversation from five years ago as a script, we read our words from the past aloud to one other within the context of our roles to one another now. For me it's about the inevitable forgiving, rewriting, and reconciliation we must perform to our beliefs and our relationships.

Split

2009-07-22T02:33:00.000-05:00

This video parallels footage from driving in Baltimore with footage from driving in Udaipur, Jodphur, and Jaipur, India. The audio is a series of stories shared between my British friend who I met in India. We convened again in New York City’s Chinatown and traded stories about our experience of India, our experience of the Western world, and how each as influenced the other within our paradigms. In the audio as well as the video, comparison and contrast give way to a complex fluidity of the unexpected. It runs 14 minutes and 40 seconds.

mensajitos

2009-07-21T21:19:00.000-05:00

At a milonga I had each tanguero and tanguera write a message on the palm of their partner before they began to dance. The messages were photographed but the partners were not allowed to read them until after they danced. Because it was a hot night in Houston and the intense, intimate dance of tango, our messages dissolved into the palms of one another. I waited until after I had put time and distance between myself, the event, and the dancers to share the documentation of it. From these unlabeled pictures we then remembered and deciphered what the messages had been during the dances which had dissolved them- inserting language that described a connection into the memory of a sensed experience.

Houston ceremony

2009-07-21T20:27:00.001-05:00

I was away from my home when Hurricane Ike hit, away unable to witness the event or aid in the aftermath. I wrote a love letter to my hurricaned city. My friend Andrew in Houston agreed to collaborate and placed the letter in the flooded Bayou. Here the words of the love letter dissolved, using the very floodwaters which had spread so much destruction as the means of spreading and laving care. I used the photographs he took of this happening to retrace the lines of my love letter. My friend Andria also collaborated by creating a lullaby based on the words of the love letter. I used her soothing refrain as the soundtrack to a collage I made of Ike youtube footage taken by Houstonians. I projected the video with Andria’s song all over the wall behind me, while I stood in front, holding pages of Andrew’s pictures and reading the love letter. For each portion I read, I dipped my hands in water and handed the flooded page to one of the witnesses. In this way I wanted use collaboration to collapse separation and participation to intertwine experience. I wanted to use the distance between home and here, performer and audience, destruction and healing, to converge witnesses and collaborate in a restoration.

Physics/Art Collaboration

2009-07-21T18:49:00.000-05:00

While studying the interlinked histories of art and science, I carried out the project posted at http://physicsartcollaboration.blogspot.com/. I wanted to create an analog social-network, more specifically one that would span the most opposite cultural environments and academic specializations I could imagine. I facilitated an exquisite corpse collaboration between artists at Maryland Institute College of Art and physicists at Texas A&M University in which each group used their respective language to converse with the other.

Paint the Canvas Purple

2009-07-21T18:46:00.000-05:00

I approached twenty strangers in a Philadelphia food court and asked them to “paint the canvas purple” and volunteer whatever information about themselves they might want to. A homogenous grid of paintings could have resulted, but instead each person’s mark was left, unique and indicative. The full version with a full description, good pics, and readable notes from each participant is at: http://thecarrieart.com/workfallmica.html click on "to others"

Step 1-245

2009-07-21T18:22:00.001-05:00

I screen printed and hand colored a series of t-shirts featuring the logo I designed of the bicycle motor company my Dad hopes to start up. I wrote out the 245 steps of this process and presented it with audio from the phone call I got from my Dad after he received the t-shirts as a surprise in the mail.

Layering Homes, Collaboration with Dad

2009-07-21T18:21:00.000-05:00

While at MICA my homes were fairly opposite; a conservative football town in the shadow of Houston, and the campus of an art school in Baltimore. I welcomed stretching between the two but also wanted to collapse the space between them. At the same time I missed the Texas wildflowers, I marveled at the Baltimore blossoms. I sent photographs of the blossoms to my Dad, who then photographed them re-sited in a field of Texas wildflowers. I hung these photographs in the trees among the original blossoms. Each stage in the process documents an increment of time, distance, growth, and season. Also, because communicating my work to my Dad is difficult; this practice was a dialog with my Dad through my work.

Layered Portrait

2009-07-21T18:10:00.001-05:00

I wanted to expand the limited description that portraits achieve of their subjects by stringing together multiple descriptions. These drawings of my mom are done from memory and attempt to include all of the times, points of views, and emotional states I could muster.

Physiognomy

2009-07-21T17:52:00.000-05:00

I wrote an art history thesis about portraiture via the soft science of physiognomy- the idea that you determined by your own face as you age- facial bones are eroded and facial muscles are built up by the expressions that we habitually display. These expressions are determined by our reactions to events and our outlook on life (strong jutting jaw for an aggressive, assertive personality, weak chin for someone who looks at the floor, apologizes for their words). So I read in an old book on physiognomy that the right side of your face represents the dominant personality- the self which you present to the world, and the left side represents the recessive, introverted self. I tested it out in a class that focused on the doubling of reality by showing each person's actual face, the right side mirrored, and the left side of the face mirrored. Each portrait is strangely unrecognizeable and yet also telling of the person.

Proposed Mailbox

2009-07-21T17:13:00.000-05:00

This proposal is a collaboration with Stephen (who is an engineer) for a sculpture of communication that could link the windows of MICA’s studio center with street level North Ave and the public bus shelter on it, enabling a continuous and anonymous conversation between the art institution and the city it inhabits.

Drawings: made at the artery summer 09

2007-11-30T18:48:00.003-06:00

These are recent, but I wanted them organized with the other drawings on the blog.

Drawings: Portraits

2007-11-29T15:48:00.000-06:00

Drawings: Figure, Technical, Illusionism

2007-11-28T16:23:00.001-06:00

Just a few of way too many, maybe I'll add more sometime

2007-11-10T16:43:00.000-06:00

Although the whole time I knew that I didn't really feel licensed to render another person's stories, when I got back from Cambodia, I made this cylindrical drawing based on Bun Thab's story in the book Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America. It's a cyclinder suspended from the ceiling at eye level, so that the viewer enters a 360 narrative cycle instead of a flat statement on a rectangular plane.

Illustration

2007-10-28T19:23:00.002-05:00

At RISD precollege and for fall semester sophomore year at MICA I was an illustration major. Here's some work from back then:

The drawing of the folded sheet of paper was an illusionism assignment, the drawing of touts in India was influenced by Mewar miniatures.

Donkey Cabbage

sketch of one of my professors

this peice was probably a sarcastic response to Shipley's soapboxes

Ride to the Institution

Lady on the Roof

A fold out book about anorexia (click to enlarge)

Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground

Mural

2007-08-29T18:00:00.000-05:00

This is a mural I made at Marlborough Apartments. Back in the day, the Cohn sisters and their massive art collection lived there, but more recently it's been divided up into apartments for senior citizens. On the right of my wall was Mrs. Grace, who used to quilt, and on the left of my space was Mrs. Shannon, who had wallpapered all of her walls with magazine cutouts and pictures from church bulletins. So I got this idea by combining ideas from both spaces, the quilt is made of collaged patterns and colors from pictures in old National Geographics that I got from The Book Thing.

Panoram (memory)

2007-08-29T17:46:00.001-05:00

This is a cyclindrical drawing I made from memories of my time in Bolivia.

Psyche Map

2007-07-29T17:00:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to untangle all my beliefs and biases so I tried to map them all out on this great big paper. Sometimes they lead back in time to a founding memory, sometimes to a person, a chain of relationships, or a value I learned. I need a bigger peice of paper.

twenty-five-proposals-not-yet-realized

2005-09-16T03:35:00.000-05:00

1. cover each room in chalkboard paint, walls, floors, ceiling. paint guidelines/outlines for games. hand man, tick tack toe, crossword, dot line square game, floor is hopskotch and foursquare. there's a white gym ball for this. top can maybe be used for projectile flour bombs/darts. i stay in the gallery all the time and play games with visitors, staff, guards, etc. invitations to play are posted in schools, an ad taken out in the newspaper, flyers in grocery stores, postcards on community bulletin boards.

2. each morning i pick up a day laborer and take them to the gallery. they get paid by the hour, whatever the usual rate is, maybe $1 more. they can either make some art, write down a joke in an official joke log, teach me something, learn something from me, or have a conversation about whether it is exploiting them to take them to a gallery and include them in the art. when they don't want to do that anymore i can take them to a different place where they could get picked up. the remnants can be left behind, but i don't want them to be a spectacle, unless they want to be seen. at fancy openings we could not invite any regular art people and only pay day laborers to come. it's illegal to pay illegal immigrants.

3. make a communal nap space. you enter through a hand sewn curtain, beautiful blue with patchwork stars. the light is very soft and calm and the floor is covered with cushions. the space is overhung with sheets like a tent or a fort. there is a tape player, tape recorder, tapes, labels, a marker, and some books. there are some prerecorded tapes that i recorded in the space of me reading a bed time story and/or singing a lullaby. visitors can listen to these in the nap space and then are asked to record either a story or a lullaby to pass on to the next person.

4. the gallery starts out empty but fills up with polaroids taken of each visitor.

5. the gallery starts out empty but fills up with portraits of each visitor, or an illustration from their life, drawn live by the artist.

6. the gallery starts out with large sturdy sheets of rives bfk or arches and a charcoal base. the drawing is panoramic around the whole room and fills up depending on requests from visitors.

7. i put out a singles ad and meet all of the responders in the gallery space. they, in turn, could also use it to meet their responders (if it doesn't work out between us)

8. i start a free day care in the gallery space

9. the gallery space is empty except for a computer, on a desk, with a chair. when the visitor comes in they can sit down. the computer has internet access and contains a chronologic file folder ordering system based on order of visitors. each visitor can make a profile to share with the nextcoming visitors. there are bins for favorite youtube video, one facebook profile picture, and one characteristic tweet. names are not required. meeting face to face is not encouraged.

10. the gallery space is turned into a makeover studio. if a visitor wants a makeover, they have to serve as advisor to the next person. there are clothes, hair styling stuff, makeup, etc, and a little portrait booth that documents the before and after.

11. beautiful palm sized paper cut outs are made and perforated but not removed from their substrate paper. each visitor can take the cut out and leave the substrate, but they must use it to build a link in a fence that panorams the space.

12. take a penny leave a penny: a penny sculpture is made. using the connectors people can build and mold whatever form they wish. a plaque tells people that every penny was left by a previous visitor- maybe this provokes the next people to give. pennies are provided but can also be donated. the pennies at the end of it are used to start the next exhibition. when its all over it can be coin starred and given to the cashiers that work in that store, or given to something good like a charity or artspace, or melted into material for metal artists.

13. the entire floor is turned into a trampoline. sound is broadcast only at the top of the room, along with wonderful smells, bubbles, and cool air.

14. i trade jobs with the janitor, the docent, the guard, the director, the funder. they have to stay in the gallery space and make work and i do their job.

15. i meet funders, the individuals. i tell them that their self expression is really important and even encourage them to make art and show it in my space. we take a walk together. i find out what wonderful human beings they really are.

16. a map of the world is drawn on the floor with one product from skymall occupying the space of its originating country. originating or affiliated.

17. a letter writing room with letter writing stations and mailbins. to your children, future or present. to your parents. to your ex. to your boss. etc. you can write and also read. like if you're a neice you can read all the letters written to neices, etc.

18. a gallery space turned into a kitchen but if you eat there you have to also feed someone else there.

19. a dining room table for a dinner party where all the people shit together but have to go in a little room alone to eat by themselves.

20. a room that is even hotter and more humid than outside so that it gives you gratefullness for outside.

21. the gallery space is filled with legos and anyone can build.

22. a makeover room where everything is provided for you to change what race you look like.

23. a coupon dispenser (but like the ticket number dispenser on deli counters or passport offices) at the exit to the gallery that gives out coupons saying "as renumeration for your visit you earn: a guilt free afternoon of beer and tv/ an elitist attitude/ an air of sophistication to impress your date/ a heightened sense of self importance/ enlightenment/ edification/ proof that you are culturally savvy/ validation of your intelligence/ etc"

24. a complete drawing that visitors are invited to erase, a weaving that visitors are invited to unravel

25. if you visit my space, you have to stay until you tell me a joke that makes you laugh and i tell you a joke that makes me laugh. uncomfortable, insincere, apologetic laughter does not qualify.