The title of Karen Carson’s show of new “bas relief” paintings, exhibited alongside some of the zippered canvas works that marked her debut into the Los Angeles art world almost half a century ago, “Middle Ground” is a kind of conundrum, consistent with the kinds of conundrums her work has presented throughout her career. Presenting those earliest works as a reference point, the show toggled between that ‘primary’ conversation and the larger, more encompassing conversation of her evolving body of work.

This is not the first time her work has incorporated “bas-relief” elements or wood moldings, though she has never exploited the latter technique as variously or virtuosically. Inverting that original ‘primary,’ these prismatic, often kaleidoscopic compositions further deconstruct, dissolve or refract the object into a kind of folding screen, moving forward and back in depth as well as horizontally and vertically.

Karen Carson Yellow Diamonds (2018). Courtesy GAVLAK

Although both palette and composition give some evidence of environmental or even bodily inspiration — as in Butterfly (2018), a vulva-like lozenge contained within a trussed rectangle extended outward on either side as if by a camera’s accordion bellows — these are fairly rigorous abstractions, their deliberation underscored by graphic and geometric elements.

Carson has a fascination with the reflected, repeated image or pattern, symmetries, or their manufactured illusion or inversion — in short, the manipulated appearance or actuality.  A surface projection (in one color palette), e.g., in Pink Pole (2018), may define an area that recedes behind the picture plane; yet this is overlaid with a black-gray-white ‘reflection’ magnifying the central ‘ground’ behind a more vibrantly painted projection in the middle of a tripartite construction.  Whether reflecting or merely referencing physical, atmospheric/environmental, or carnal elements, throughout it is the ‘ground’ itself that is least certain.

Carson plays with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions, opening out a space or hollow, only to break it apart or push it forward in another quadrant. This is a collapsible universe. Yellow Diamonds (2018) frustrates the ‘movement’ of its kaleidoscopic fractalization by containing it within the rectangle of its frame/enclosure; yet its visual operations might be extrapolated beyond its virtual perimeter, an infinite expansion and recession, progression and regression. In the meantime, she draws our attention to the painted surfaces, the expressive dimension deliberately restrained as if to underscore the temporal impermanence or entirely conditional aspect of the configuration.

Carson is also interested in the straightforwardly fractured image or surface, the arbitrary divisions or abrupt discontinuities that stop or turn the eye in another direction entirely. Gray Swirl (2018) and the most recent of her featured works, Red Fracture (2020), are essentially diptychs and remarkably true in their perfectly mirrored reflection/reversals. Again, the painterly element unsettles this perfect symmetry.

In other words, the painterly imperfection here is a device like any other to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about both surface and structure—which is where this show would have us turn back to the landmark works that constituted Carson’s Los Angeles debut and a direct challenge to the arbitrary terms attached to Minimalism and dominating the discourse of that time, effectively challenging Donald Judd’s “single thing” (also, Morris and LeWitt) with that which might be “open and extended, more or less environmental”—each as playful and brilliant as when they first appeared. 

Taking an expansive, sophisticated, and painterly approach, Carson here revisits some of her original foundational concerns, leaving it ultimately to the viewer as to what may constitute that ‘middle ground,’ or indeed if there is any middle ground at all.