Karen Carson at Rosamund Felsen - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

In the last scarcely any years, Karen Carson has experimented with radical shifts of form and medium in discrete bodies of work that build upon the expressive content of her earlier abstract paintings. Her greatest in quantity recent project, titled "Simple tasks - Easy Pieces," is a series of vinyl banners and silk-screened placards executed in the style of Las Vegas signage and bearing simple spiritual body s An obvious rebutial to the political hectoring of novel art by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer Carson's work addresses the spiritual vacuum which lies behind America's myriad social moot points Emulating the mad graphic mix of a casino advertisement for, say, Bobby Vinton at the Stardust, Carson lays without the message You Are a mind alongside a thunderbird form embellished with Egyptian motifs.

Inspired by means of the symbol-laden iconography of Tibetan prayer stones and Buddhist prayer mats, Carson exorcisms out her pithy messages in mettlesome typeface on geometric backdrops. She avoids that tricky and exhausted '80 figure of speech the photograph. She ornaments her spiritual advertisements with simple hand-drawn organ of visions light bulbs, skeletons and diamonds. The simplified graphics and bare-bones message help fend not on any hint of agit-prop superiority; the work is liberated from the irritable sarcasm of so much new art.

For the smaller-sized [i]affiche[/i]s Carson milks the fate-haunted figures of Las Vegas, dice and diamonds, to create not divisible by 2 eschatological totems. Spin presents a slot-machine facade; between the slot labeled "Future" and "Past" is individual marked simply "Spin." Breathe, adapting the forms of pinball-machine graphics, promises that each "In/Out" of the lung will add bonus points to one's score.

In a startling bill and banner, Carson presents a kind of reality sandwich returned in the style of a diner menu; between sum of two units slices of bread, starkly labeled "Birth" and "Death," the ham and cheese in the middle is embellished with a cursive "Thank You." Here Carson [i]v a[/i]s the world's biggest cliche from the grip of cynicism and irony, offering it up as a kind of blessing of life's dialectic relationship with death. above another banner's discreetly lettered words "Father" and "Mother," Carson has spray-painted the word "Thanks," tagger-style, bringing her redemptive message into the loaded realm of the family. She dismisses today's Oedipal blame-mongering with a simple (but undoubtedly difficult) public acknowledgement of her parents' contribution to her life. This is the impressed sign of soul-searching she is after: a reckoning with personal history that sparks the discovery of a faculty of perception of self.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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