Karen Carson: Eye Shadow
February 1 - March 15, 2025
Opening reception: February 1, 2:00pm to 5:00pm
We are pleased to announce “Karen Carson: Eye Shadow,” an exhibition of new artworks by this veteran Los Angeles artist. “Eye Shadow” is presented in conjunction with “Steven Steinman: New Paintings.” Both shows open on Saturday, February 1 and continue through March 1 at as-is.la
Karen Carson is not averse to gimmicks. (In the best sense of that contested term). Starting with her “Zipper Pieces” from 1972–large, wall-mounted fabric panels in variable configurations controlled by gravity and the adjustment of industrial strength zippers—and at various points since, Carson has found novel ways to add material complexity to the traditional painting genre in an ongoing effort to both critique and enrich it.
So too here in this grouping of eight modestly scaled (averaging about two by three feet) bas-relief constructions of painted wood and mirror strips presented in boxy artist-designed frames. The geometries Carson deploys in this work are dynamic, effectively suggesting deep space in a shallow format. Her palette however is mostly muted, favoring secondary colors with graphic accents of black and gray. Into this already complex arrangement the artist adds a number of disruptive and eye-catching mirror strips. She does so following some carefully calibrated recipe: never so much mirror as to overwhelm the painted portions of the artwork. Never so little as to go unnoticed. Rather like how a woman so inclined might apply her own makeup—just enough to catch the viewer’s attention. As her exhibition title “Eye Shadow” confirms, Carson’s reference to the tools and strategies of feminine allure is deliberate. And it is quite personal, as is so much of this artist’s other work. But while her mirror gimmick operates in support of her self-feminizing thesis, it serves another function as well.
Marcel Duchamp’s telling phrase “the viewer’s share” reminds us that the art audience is always already co-implicated in the art experience, the artist’s accomplice, so to speak. So too are the other artworks on view, as is the sponsoring institution—art gallery or museum—which frames it all. The introduction of mirrors into visual art, here in Carson’s work as elsewhere, makes this often unacknowledged collaboration explicit, as everyone and everything in the room gets captured in the mirrors and reflected back—a fittingly social and public ending for an artist’s project with beginnings as intimate as her’s.