Carlye Packer is pleased to present Government Denies Knowledge, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Carolyn Forrester. This is the New York-based artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.
Forrester’s varied painting techniques, which the artist describes as an experiment with speeds, implicate discussions of mediation and the supposed reality contained within an image. At once intuitive and dense with references, her virtuosic paintings are perched at the edge of dissociation, grasping at a reality that is already itself under question.
Forrester builds up her compositions over gridded base layers which create a rigid structure against which her planar distortions come to suggest fissures in space and time. Some of these underpaintings directly quote Modernist forebears Picabia and Mondrian, simultaneously invoking and dispensing with their inquiries into painting as a site of historicity and perception. The intuitive brushwork on the top layer of her paintings, meanwhile, makes a similarly open-ended allusion to the Impressionist reverence for perceptual experience.
The works in Government Denies Knowledge all speak to the threat of incoherence amid a rapidfire proliferation of visual information. Alluding to the digital interference of the past thirty years, Forrester’s masterful paintings present an accumulation of pre-mediated images that challenge the notion of the picture’s evolution. Collapsing time and history, her spatial constructions depict conjure a euphoric yet ominous experience of the image moving out of reach.
Carolyn Forrester (b. 1993, West Point, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, where she is an artist-in-residence at Art Cake. Forrester received a B.A. from Yale University in 2015 and an MFA from the Leroy E Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA, in 2020. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions at Current Space, Baltimore, MD; Art Cake, Brooklyn, NY; School 33, Baltimore, MD; and featured in print publications like The Vassar Review . She was chosen to attend the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and has received fellowships that include a CIPE research fellowship from Yale University.