Leave it to Karen Carson to pay homage to Cézanne’s landscapes in a format usually reserved for promoting the latest twelve-pack special. Carson, who has named paintings after Disney songs and created abstract images based on Renaissance theories of composition, constructed Landscape After Cézanne, 2000, by layering cut-out, drawn-on sheets of colored transparent vinyl over a framed light box, whose fluorescent tubes are themselves wrapped in colored gels to maximize the diffusion and variety of light and hue. The brilliant result appeals to the side of oneself that still admires a good black-light poster while also appealing to the side that admires a solid exercise in color and composition.
Landscape After Cézanne is one of eight light-box works offering a survey of land- and seascape themes in the gallery’s darkened back room. As eye-candyish as they are, as eyesore-ish as they flirt with becoming, Mountain Lake with Reflection, 2000, Ocean with Pink Cloud, 2001, and Desert, 2000 (yes, the titles are that syrupy), effectively transported me to odd combinations of places I’ve been and known—both in real life and in daydreams and fantasies, channeled through a variety of culture and media conduits. Waterfall with Music Notes, 2000, with its cartoony fragments of quarter and eighth notes dancing over a cascading torrent, virtually sings. Forest Fire, 2000, which takes full advantage of the medium’s capacity to deliver a range of hot lights and smoldering darks, might bring on bad Bambi flashbacks, but it also solicits a shiver of the sublime, and is as good an example of awesome-nature Romanticism as any.
The gallery’s main room, strewn with Oriental carpets, became a salon lined with paintings of paintings: Dramatically unfurling banners carrying landscapes rendered in a sign painter’s shorthand appeared on—what else?—vinyl banners. These pictures offered another thematic sampler, with two versions of the musical falls motif and nineteen paintings combining variables of river, big sky, waterfall, mountain, desert, and assorted flora, all twisting, bending, and flowing to follow their fluid illusionistic grounds.
The gallery’s entry held a single large painting, also on a banner, of a postcard desert marked with words in a wild-west typeface, looking like a movie title that has just leapt to the foreground of the screen. Delivering an elegant pun, they read “MAKING THE SEEN” and provided names for both the piece and the showgoing straight to the heart of the matter. On first glance, one might assume these works to be a calculated assault on high sensibilities, but like much of Carson’s output, they simply prod one to get over one’s smirks and get on with the act of viewing, of enjoying the bold results of the artist’s mastery over both high-art composition and low-budget special effects as well as her fearlessness in the face of kitsch.
—Christopher Miles
