JoAnne Carson: A Sense of Wonder Gallery Guide

Greenlight, 2015

G ALL E RY GU IDE

Orange Sun, 2014

Dark Cloud (study for Field Days), 2012

OVERVIEW A Sense of Wonder features large-scale paintings and drawings created by JoAnne Carson over the past decade. Carson’s improvisational worlds of flora embody playful, surreal, and often dark connotations. Her exuberant compositions feature animated abstractions in the form of bushes, flowers, branches, and trees that are as beguiling as they are disconcerting. Richly patterned and pulsating with color, her imagery evokes the transformative and cyclical nature of life.

Many of the works in this exhibition are inspired by the terraced garden Carson cultivates at her rural home in Shoreham, Vermont. The lush landscape becomes an imaginative extension of the artist’s studio where she experiments with form, composition, and color. Gardening and creative practice actively dialogue together as the artist transforms the natural world into fanciful characters engaged in a mysterious narrative.

Carson’s paintings and drawings are defined by their sense of wonder — for nature that is abundantly wild and resilient, yet simultaneously fragile and distorted by human intervention. The artist observes that in our longing for an authentic experience amidst both the uncertainty and perseverance of nature, we are compelled to reframe our sense of wonderment in today’s world.

Breezy, 2019

Field Days, 2014

View of artist’s garden

BIOGRAPHY JoAnne Carson (b. 1953, New York) is a nationally recognized artist who works primarily in drawing, painting, and sculpture. She combines observation, fantasy and narrative to create colorful, hybrid imagery that embraces both the whimsical and monstrous. Following her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois, she earned her MFA from the University of Chicago. Carson has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions including venues such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Frederick Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy’s Rome Prize, a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Louise Bourgeois Residency from Yaddo, among others. Carson is Professor of Studio Art and Graduate Director of Art & Art History at the University of Albany, New York, and divides her time between her home in Shoreham, Vermont, and Brooklyn, New York.

2020 EXHIBITION YEAR PRESENTED BY

BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Arts Council.

BURLINGTON CITY ARTS 135 CHURCH STREET BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG