BIO

Monica Carroll lives and works in Longmont, Colorado

STATEMENT

I paint to explore and to question; it is a language for me. While working with my hands, conjuring color, line and form, the mind calms, the heart rate slows, thoughts become more coherent. When I take an idea out for a walk on a piece of paper or canvas, I am often surprised by the result. I always gain a new perspective. Landscape, the environment, family, wonder, the act of painting, the notion of the “treasured” object, water and time are all themes that appear in my work in various ways. I am a fish out of water in our digitally saturated world. The more instantaneous the making and sharing of an image becomes today with Iphones, the more I wish to retreat to making slow perceptual paintings or methodical, meditative drawings, ignoring the digital language that surrounds me. But that is not a welcome path, so how do I employ that language, alongside painting, to explore the questions that interest me? I am constantly searching for my definition of “What is a painting, now?”

This search sometimes happens in the form of slow perceptual paintings -from still life to landscape, which keep me in touch with my process of looking, noticing, feeling, observing and expressing. It sometimes happens in the form of large paintings created from memory of a place, assisted by digital images I take while exploring that place--- Gesture, memory, scale are introduced . The search sometimes takes the form of learning new processes of capturing, erasing, layering, with digital tools, which allows me to be spectator of my work. When I layer these various approaches in a single work, the chaos, the ruptures, and sameness all interest me.

I am especially interested in how this collision of processes both mimics and impacts memory. I see painting – an evolved, digitally tangled form of it-- as one way for me to investigate and to better understand how our relationship to our memories is changing in this digitally flooded culture. How will my choices about painting sculpt my memories? Do we have agency over our memory?

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