This content was published: February 17, 2011. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Cara Tomlinson Occupied: small paintings, works on paper, and objects
Sylvania North View Gallery
House Not Home #2: painting by Cara Tomlinson
- Dates: February 17 to March 18, 2011
- Gallery talk and reception: Wednesday, February 23, 4pm
Cara Tomlinson’s work has been shown nationally in solo and group shows, including the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, Davenport Museum of Art and Des Moines Art Center in Iowa and the Charles Allis Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI. She has been awarded several residencies, most recently at Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Constance Saltonstall Residency in Ithaca, NY. Tomlinson graduated with an MFA in Painting from University of Oregon and received her undergraduate degree from Bennington College in Vermont. She currently is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Artist’s statement
These recent paintings and works on paper are concerned with the process of construction: how houses, paintings and bodies are made. They refer to the protection a dwelling, like a fortress, provides us; but also to the permeability of the house or body; the windows, doors, openings, through which life comes and goes, the shaky, fragile and temporary construction of shelter. Paint, too, embodies within it a similar dichotomy: it conceals and covers over but also creates the illusion of an opening and space. These paintings explore a quality of home that is so familiar that one loses the clear delineations of self inside it. The German language has a word that aptly describes this state: “unheimlichkeit”: uncanniness or “unhomelikeness”. This happens in the expression of the play between the figure and ground and the metaphors of inside/outside–transforming familiar boundaries into the unfamiliar.
The recent objects are artifacts of a daily studio process and the accumulated material and thinking. Color is an animating force in nature. Bits of paint animate and colonize the surfaces they inhabit. This work is a hybrid between painting and sculpture and explores ideas about the boundaries of the studio and the gallery and the desire for a painting to come alive.Cara Tomlinson
Images from the exhibition
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