CAROLYN CASE - BUBBLING UP AND BOILED DOWN
24 March - 14 April 2022
Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Bubbling up and Boiled down, an online solo exhibition by Baltimore-based artist Carolyn Case opening on March 24, 2022.
Carolyn Case uses the painting vocabulary of texture, colour, and space to interrogate what it means to live in a visual world. Here, painting functions as an exploratory method that offers alternative readings to daily rituals, family routines, and the sometimes mundane order of life that gives peace and stability to our everyday living experience. Case’s abstract imagery points towards the sublime but at the same time it references domestic moments taken from the time she spends in the kitchen, specifically doing the dishes and standing above the sink. Case describes: With everyone eating at home, cleaning the kitchen punctuates my day and dirty dishes even bookend my studio time. After meals, I began photographing the sink, when the water was multi-coloured, and bits of spinach and noodles were floating about.
These contained sinks were reminiscent of lily pad-filled ponds, so I connected domestic spaces with imagined romantic water lilies in my paintings. The combination of the kitchen sink and the lily pads became the specific imagery I thought about as I painted. Through a long process of adding and removing thick layers of pigments to rebuild the surface, Case encounters the world's magic in her submerged organic forms. Indeed, the paintings in this show result from constant observation, decision making, building, and erasing. The artist refers to her practice as a deeply intuitive and experimental path, a method of 'call and response' where ideas somehow have to obey the needs of the material and the opportunities that can arise from the paint.
Originally from California, Carolyn Case earned her MFA from MICA's Mount Royal School of Art in Baltimore, MD, and her BFA from California State University in Long Beach, CA. She now resides in Baltimore, Maryland with her family. Her solo exhibitions include Asya Geisberg Gallery, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA, Lux Art Institute, CA, Western Michigan University, Loyola University, MD, McLean Projects for the Arts, Washington, D.C., and the Art Registry in Washington, D.C. She has participated in two-person and group exhibitions at the Delaware Museum of Art, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, The Parlour Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY, Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY, and John Fonda Gallery, Baltimore, MD. Residencies include the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lux Art Institute, CA, the School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Kanoria Centre for the Arts in Ahmedabad, India. Reviews include Art Forum, ArtNews, the Baltimore Sun, New American Paintings, Metro Weekly, and Two Coats of Paint. She has received the Bethesda Painting Award and is a 2018 and 2017 Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Semi-finalist. She is full-time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Image: Carolyn Case, "Red Sink," 2021, Oil on panel, 42" x 40".