The patterns in Andrea Carlson’s paintings swirl in the corner of your eye and hold a fierce repose when you look at them straight on. There’s something living in there. It’s not so much complicated as simply un-nameable. In Aadinzookanaag (Spirits), for instance, angular cloud shapes stay just at the edge of resolving into figures of animals and birds, while the black and white chevrons of the receding landscape indicate a charged ground, a place where anything could happen. Still, representation isn’t quite the point here; invocation is. The meaning that Carlson conjures isn’t an interpretation, it’s a force.
These complex, demanding, funny, lavish, and sexy paintings (it’s typical of Carlson’s work that you keep coming up with words that you usually don’t think of together) are something completely new as well as ancient, and they’re getting their twenty-six-year-old creator noticed in many quarters. Along with her solo exhibition this month at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis (Culture Cop opens September 8), Carlson has shows coming up at Banfill-Locke Art Center in Fridley and in London at the October Gallery; she will be featured next April at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a two-person show with fellow Ojibwe painter Jim Denomie.
Carlson, who grew up in International Falls and Hutchinson, is a Grand Portage band member with Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and Swedish roots and, as of last year, an MFA graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She now lives in Minneapolis and keeps a studio in the north loop warehouse district. The work she makes there looks immediate and current; its intensely designed surfaces, thinly painted in glowing colors and sharp black and white, refer to a vivid world, one that is purely of her own making. Yet its images are faithful, in their own impure way, to two traditions.
Since 2004, she’s been painting a series called Aadizokaan, works that powerfully embody the sacred stories of her Anishinaabe ancestors. The Aadizokaan works will be featured in the exhibition at SooVAC alongside a new series that brings the artist’s Swedish heritage into the mix—and her individual life, as well.
Carlson’s earlier work took its motive force from the impossible, the catalyst that supplants the ordinary with the fantastic. A wooden stump, for example, becomes the round ass of a demigod. In her new series, the transformations build. Swedish Dala horses—those red-painted carved wooden steeds that seem, here in Minnesota, empty nostalgia—appear, in the context of Carlson’s work, newly energized as sacred creatures (which they once were, back in the old country). Teapots and carnival glass also turn up: These were charged objects in the house of Carlson’s grandmother, carefully tended things that accumulated meaning from their passage through time. And in one new piece, a vibrator makes explicit a strong sexual thread that also lurked in the earlier mythic paintings.
Carlson studies the Ojibwe language (she describes her skill as “conversational,” but not up to the fluency of elders). The tribe’s traditional words and stories have given her many of the threads of imagery that appear in her paintings, and the amazing subtlety of the language has been an influence, as well: There are thousands of ways to conjugate verbs, and compound words can be breathtakingly precise. She explains this in describing a painting titled Gagiibwaabimo. “It’s actually the image of a dead wolf, gutted, ripped out on the inside. This is Naniboujou’s nephew who has just been killed and eaten by the Mishipiizhiw, the water lynx, a bad guy, so Naniboujou’s going around crying. When I was studying the stories and retranslating them, and I came across this word gagiibwaabimo, which means ‘His eyes are puffed from crying.’ I was so floored by it, that there was one word that described this whole thing, that I wanted to paint an image that went with it.”
Another characteristic of Anishinaabe language—its robust humor—appears in Binewidgee, a piece whose word means “the ruffed grouse’s asshole.” This word comes up in a traditional storytelling at a climactic point, telling listeners they’ll have to wait for the end of the story the following night. In the painting, the little x that marks the relevant point on the bird’s stern has an exquisite comic force among Carlson’s elegant forms.
Part of what’s striking about Carlson is how sure she is in her work, how confident in her mastery of an absolutely original and sophisticated style. That may well be because she has been working at it since she was a toddler. Her father still has a small sculpture she made back then, a reindeer created from a stuffed nylon stocking. “He keeps it in this little box,” she said, “my first piece of art.” Even back then, she had confidence that she would be understood and her efforts would be taken seriously; her father, Rudolf Carlson, taught art in schools in International Falls and Hutchinson, and is a painter working with hyperrealism and abstract subversions of hyperrealism.
“He taught me a lot,” Carlson said of her father, “and now, I guess, my job is to ruin everything. It’s one thing to carry your family’s identity and it’s another to find your own style. There are things that I remember from him, about what colors go together, formal patterns—but the thing is not to just follow.”
By that she also means not just following herself, either. A brand-new painting, Under the Blanket, included in the SooVAC show, prominently features a blue-willow teapot. Describing its origins, she recalled, “I was up north, on an island, at a sacred site. There were graves where people leave tobacco and things, and there were other kinds of offerings, too: all these sparkly barrettes with horses on them, really girly, and I realized that modern things can be offerings. I’d been making the Naniboujou paintings, really traditional and formal, and I wanted to break it up, and this tea set seemed so much part of the other tradition. It kind of started off being in opposition to the Naniboujou imagery, but then I was speaking to an elder and he said he’d seen the exact same tea set left as an offering at a burial site. I thought, ‘Well, I guess there’s a reason besides all the meanings that are loaded onto this thing in the European world.’ So I did the teapot, sort of Victorian kitschy, as if it was left behind as an offering in a mysterious landscape.”
Carlson performs the magic trick of using absolutely specific material to create art that is universal. Her family has a long involvement with artifacts from all sorts of cultures, collecting everything from beadwork to teapots to McDonald’s toys to Scandinavian décor. Carlson is a collector, too; she says she particularly likes objects that feature landscapes, which she might portray in her work: “I can have in the painting a place within a place, a world within a world.”
Given the controversy over the last few years about “authenticity” in native art and writing (most recently, David Treuer offers some blistering thoughts on this in a new book of essays), one wonders if Carlson anticipates a reaction to the multiple worlds she includes in her paintings. Or, more pointedly, whether she, as a person of dual heritage, gets labeled “inauthentic,” not a real Ojibwe artist.
“I started questioning authenticity, what is ‘real’ native art. A lot of native artists are questioning this, a lot of people are angry,” she said. “It angers me to have someone determine what’s authentic. Damien Hirst can have a herd of artists painting his work for him and no one questions the authenticity of those paintings. But if you’re, say, transgendered and native, then your art isn’t ‘real.’ So I just started playing with it. An elder said to me once, ‘Human beings are ninety percent water, so get over yourself. We’re all water, water is ancient. We all drink it, we share each other’s cups.’ ”
It’s not blood but paint that Carlson puts her faith in. She believes that pattern has always been a home for spirit, and that artists can make forms and rhythms that spirits recognize. She’s very matter-of-fact, although also a little embarrassed, when talking about it. “There’s a spiritual relation to pattern. There’s something out there, it’s drawn to something of its own nature, like a hummingbird to the color red. To me, patterns are a representation of spirits to themselves … Spirituality is out of fashion now, but if you don’t look at it as a religion, but as a ‘spiritual practice,’ you can get people to talk about it,” she said. “I started thinking about it as a methodology. You say, ‘I had a vision,’ or ‘spirituality,’ and people just shut you off, but if you say, ‘I stop food and water for a while, it increases my dreams,’ any scientist can respect that.”
Ultimately, though, she’s forging her own path, regardless of where criticism might be coming from: “I look for a way of navigating the world without stepping on too many feet.”
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