Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine

Combining intergenerational history, archival research and theories of art and film, Andrea Carlson creates incisive works of resistance and sovereignty that disempower colonial storytelling and practices of erasure. A descendant of the Grand Portage Band of Ojibwe and Scandinavian settlers, Carlson’s layered, multi-paneled paintings are made with oil, acrylic, gouache, colored pencil, graphite, watercolor and ink. In the pieces, the horizon line is a persistent organizing principle inspired by the ungraspable horizon line of Lake Superior. Viewers are seduced into her intricate collage-like imagery, and yet, beyond the central foregrounded figures, there is an impenetrability into the dense distance. The overwhelming scale of her works also denies us access into the imagined landscapes, preventing a kind of possession of the land. Presented by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Endless Summer is a developing body of work comprised of large-scale paintings on birchbark, which reflects Carlson’s practice of interrogating longing and desire, permission and refusal, as well as themes around Indigenous sovereignty and Land Back.