PRESS RELEASE

Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on March 8, 2008 of Carolyn Carr, an exhibition of abstract paintings and large-format works on paper featuring looping and winding lines that intersect, interlock, or pass in and around each other, sometimes seemingly with a life of their own. The works are in a monochromatic gray-to-black palette that, while new for this Atlanta-based artist is nonetheless in keeping with her continued evolution toward an increasingly reductive and restrained approach in which every gesture and form has weight and significance.

Carr draws on references from the historic trajectory of abstract painting while creating works that are also in the moment, expressive of the changing culture of Atlanta , where resonances of the Civil War past mingle with those of a vibrant place at the forefront of social change in America . In Carr's neighborhood, Castleberry Hill-" Atlanta 's both oldest and newest"-horses still travel old routes (albeit now pulling tourist carriages) while the area is at the cutting-edge of politics and music.

Despite the obvious energy and buoyancy of her imagery, Carr's method is deliberate rather than arbitrary. She often begins her work with a critical analysis of contemporary conditions, and her practice reflects her view that "the future of painting lies in momentary decisions." A self-described "long-hawl painter," she does not hurry in her process, instead taking her time-a process that has been referred to as a "Southern way of approaching things." She aims always "to be mindful" in her decisions, resulting in a reductive method reflecting a conscious sense of responsibility toward the precious nature of time and the need to use it meaningfully. Her actual means of painting is not self-conscious, as she lets the places she experiences "come through her"-lingering afternoons, middle-of-the-night moonwalks, trains covered in graffiti, memories of her grandmother's garden, and the jangle of a place at the crossroads of contemporary culture and urban revitalization, characterized by the constant beat of hip-hop recording studios and by industrial structures under conversion to new art galleries. A student along with such artists as Kara Walker and Roe Etheridge at the Atlanta College of Art, Carr was trained as a photographer, and she maintains a documentary approach, using skeins of line and movement to record moments of time and space. Such a background is also reflected in her awareness of the temporal nature of her art; while her works notate particular experiences, they will themselves one day become artifacts, memories of our era. The same attitude is behind her understanding of the trajectory of abstract painting as a historical groundwork from which artists today can draw and respond. She has been particularly attentive to the approach of Robert Ryman, whose work she has admired since childhood. Her perspective is reflected in her painting Mining , the title of which is suggestive of "what it is to be an abstract painter today, mining and digging through the history of abstraction while bringing to it the perspective of a post-Colonial generation." Carr's other titles are similarly thoughtful and conceptual, often drawing from literature or the art of the past to which she adds her own spin, such as The Mystery of Manners , a twist on the title from Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, Mystery and Manners . This line also for her speaks to the lack of authentic contact in current society.

Carr began her career as a figurative artist, but as the personalities of her sitters began to outweigh the gestures and concepts she sought to explore, she gradually moved away from specificities until, as she notes, "what I was left with was the line." Her method became more conceptual as she began to carve space with line, like "carving out a lemon," so that negative space is given shape-such an approach is clearly rooted in the history of abstraction and reflects the sense of formality and the weight of the past of which Carr is deeply respectful. The subtleties of tone, qualities of the action of line, and the color and texture of the unprimed linen surfaces on which she paints each have loaded implications, producing a sense in her working process of "cliffhanging," as she responds while painting to a sense of necessity, suspense, or inevitability. In Carr's work, the balance between the unexpected and the considered, the ambiguity of forms that move from taut to languid, the changing relationships and interactions of line and space, the ways that shades of tone seem to shift and glow before us involve us in an ongoing and interactive process of engagement and reflection and above all forward movement.