Andrea Carlson: A Painting is a Coin
Curatorial essay by Clara Halpern

Andrea Carlson’s works have layers upon layers. Landscape, land stacked, language, deep time, ancestral knowledge, cinema, memorials, fossils, future visions, stories, references, refusal. These subjects popu-late her painting, drawing, film, print, and sculpture. Her work has many points of entry, prismatically refracting outward, reframing the world be-yond their borders. A Painting is a Coin brings together re-cent works by Carlson, building on concerns that have animated her more than two-decade long practice.

Landscape is central to many of the works in this exhibition, including the paintings that stretch across multiple sheets of thick hand-worked watercolour paper, layered with gouache, watercolor, inks, and oil. These fragmented images are counter-points to the historic use of “empty” landscape paintings to bol-ster colonial pursuits. The large painting Ancestor and Descendant, 2023, features a stacked landscape, for which Carlson states, “[t]here’s story upon story upon story, in a singular space. When we die, I don’t know if we will go to heaven or go to the sky, but one thing that I am very certain of is that our bodies return to the earth. The earth takes back our narratives.”  (1) The work is graphic and kaleidoscopic, oscillating and animated through repetition and mirroring, more like cinema-in-motion than static tableau. Cutting through time, the span of a single work is multifold. Carlson orients her compositions through the use of the horizon, where earth seems to meet sky.

Carlson is intentional about the scale of her work and relationship to the viewer’s body. Low-Relief Mound, 2025, a new sculptural installation of wooden columns commissioned for her exhibition at The Goldfarb Gallery, continues an ongoing series of installations based on effigy mounds—ancient Indigenous earthworks in the shapes of lizards, turtles, and cranes. In other works, Carlson has referenced the damage that colonial expansion has done to these important sites, such as in Exit, 2019, a print which depicts “Man Mound,” a 214-foot-long earthwork in Wisconsin, partially damaged by a road yet still persist-ing. This citation speaks to cultural loss, erasure, and change, but ulti-mately it also speaks to non-colonial histories that continue to endure.

Turning to the painting Ancestor and Descendant, Carlson writes, “the word in Ojibwe for both ancestor and descendant is the same word: Indaanikoobijigan. It means ‘the one who is tied to me through gen-erations’.” Focusing on these multidirectional and nonlinear connections, this work reframes relationships and time. Cultural objects, personal me-morials, text, and the natural world are enmeshed. More than assemblage, Carlson forms a matrix, dynamic and energetic, to evade a top-down order and instead carve out a space for resistance.

The painting Unearthed Cannibal, 2024, features black ash baskets flanking masks. It also includes images of City, Mi-chael Heizer’s monumental 1970–2022 sculpture in Nevada, interlaced with Indigenous effigy mounds. Images of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1983 environmental artwork Surrounded Islands hover above images of Alcatraz, a former prison island occupied by AIM activists in the late 1960s, and Isle Royale, an island on Lake Superior important for Grand Portage Anishinaabe. Mondo Cane masks, a recurring reference for Carlson drawn from exploitation cinema, are partly shroud-ed by various birds: falcons, blue jays, woodpeckers, and flickers. At the center, an upside-down image of Castillo de San Marcos, the masonry fort in St. Augustine, Florida, which later became a site of Indigenous in-carceration, appears above a structure from Heizer’s City. A text at the center gives the trigger warning “ADD SENSITIVE CONTENT STATEMENT <> WHEN COMMUNITY MEMBERS ARE IN AUDI-ENCE.” Here and in other works, Carlson doesn’t turn away from complex stories and their implications for our current moment, such as in the print Rolling Head, 2025, which references a figure in Woodlands and Plains narratives about one of the first acts of domestic violence on Turtle Island.

The idea of “the cannibal” recurs in Carlson’s work as a way of describing colonial assimilation. Carlson writes, “Land Back and Indigenous earthworks are the foil to land art within this paint-ing. Unearthed Cannibal is about this land. Among the many historic uses of black ash baskets was the abil-ity to move earth to create effigy mounds. Today black ash trees are threatened by the emerald ash borer. The violation of the land and extractive colonization has become part of our bodies, from yellow cake babies to those living under a water boil advisory. We carry the earth and the harm against the earth in our bodies. Some of my work combines references to the works of other artists or filmmakers as an archive and witness that is also what is being referenced with the centered text.” There is specificity in these images, such as re-creations of draw-ings by the artist’s great-grand-aunt in one work; in another, an inscription of mentor painter Jim Denomie’s name. Jeremy Lybarger commented in Art in America that these connections in Carlson’s work might not come to light if it weren’t for the artist’s guidance. Her reply? “Refusal is beautiful witchcraft.”  (2)

Water too runs through many of Carlson’s works. In Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 – Nibi Ezhi-Nisidawaabanjigaade Ozhibii’igewin 071200, a five-channel video/audio installation and essay by Roza-linda Borcilă and Andrea Carlson, the artists explore the monetization of wetlands through Chicago’s wetland market, where speculators can trade wetland destruction (debit) in one location for wetland banking (credit) in another. Similar to carbon offsets, wetland banking risks rewarding the environmental destruction it is purported to mitigate.

Connections to Gichi Bitobig (Grand Marais), Minnesota, where Carlson’s shoreline studio is situated are interwoven throughout her work. Another important influence for Carlson is abstract expressionist painter and sculptor George Morrison or Waawaategonegaabo-iban, 1919–2000, from Gichi Onigaming (Grand Portage Reservation, Minnesota). For her, his abstract depictions of the rock outcroppings on Gichi-gaming (Lake Superior) resonate “as a felt experience of a shared place.” In a text citing Carlson’s interest in Morrison, and their shared approaches to horizon, Gerald Vizenor writes, “Carlson creates great layers of conceptual scenes, silhouettes of cultural absence and presence, and converted landscapes of time, space, and course of memories.”  (3) Urban Cree scholar Kai Recollet has written that “gestures of futurity are choreographies of possibilities and hope—not residing so much in an unattainable dreamscape, but rather they are in constant figuration and reconfiguration all around us.”  (4) This seems true to Carlson’s work, as the artist wonders if Morrison’s paintings have marked her own perception of the lake she spends so much time looking at. And in turn Carlson’s work has the potential to do the same, reframing and refiguring the expected order, reorienting it towards new possibilities.

1. ↺ https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/journal/in-the-studio-andrea-carlson
2. ↺ https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/andrea-carlson-landscape-paintings/
3. ↺ Gerald Vizenor, “Native Art and Visionary Motion,” The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion (List Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2024), 27.
4. ↺ Karyn (Kai) Recollet, “Gestur-ing Indigenous Futurities Through the Remix,” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 1 (April 2016): 91–105, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48629481.