A Constant Sky
The horizon is a place of potential, the edge of what we perceive, and a space that refuses settlement. By using and obscuring horizons, Andrea Carlson constructs artworks based on those imagined, in-between places and spaces. Her imagery is upfront and confrontational, often impeding our view of the horizon that lies beyond and commanding a position of power.
The earth is a sphere with no beginning or end. The title of the exhibition suggests that the land, too, is continual, despite the segmented views seen in traditional landscape paintings. A Constant Sky asks us to think about objects and the stories we place upon them.
The works presented here combine art-historical references, cultural knowledge, poetry, cinema, and sequential art, elements that entangle themes of violence, memory, access, and denial.
Andrea Carlson, born in 1979, is a descendant of the Grand Portage band of Ojibwe and European settlers.
Watch Andrea Carlson work on Ancestor and Descendant (on view in the exhibition A Constant Sky) in her studio when she was in residence at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans, LA.
Duration: 4 min. 55 sec., with sound
Created by Steven J. Yazzie
Vaster Empire
2007
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, and graphite pencil on paper
Collection Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth, Alice Tweed Tuohy Foundation Purchase Fund
The words central to this painting, “WE HOLD A VASTER EMPIRE THAN HAS BEEN,” are written on a pin and reference a poem by Sir Lewis Morris celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. “Song of Empire” touts the expansion of Britain and glorifies the empire’s subjugation of people around the world. A section reads:
We hold a Vaster Empire than has been!
Nigh half the race of man is subject to our Queen!
Nigh half the wide, wide earth is ours in fee!
And where her rule comes, all are free.
Another pin references the Polly Anna Club, a children’s club that promoted cheerful attitudes.
Anti-Retro
2018
19-layer screen print on paper
Published by Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis
Denver Art Museum: Funds from the Ralph L. & Florence R. Burgess Trust, 2020.881.
Courtesy of Highpoint Editions
Exit
2018
21-layer screen print on paper
Published by Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of Highpoint Editions
Exit is a print about absence and the propagation of presence. Colonization creates a deep-seated fear of losing cultural practices, languages, and artforms. Exit references precolonial Indigenous creations: Man Mound in Baraboo, Wisconsin, mica forms, and bent tree markers. When printed in editions such as these, the visual references to these vulnerable belongings are sent out into the world in multiples as a foil to scarcity.
The Surrogates
In the Surrogates series, Carlson paints objects collected and commissioned by museums into imagined landscapes. She renders the landscapes in media and styles that contrast with those of the objects, offering a recontextualized perspective and questioning the institution’s right of possession.
As enclosed spaces, museums maintain power through possession of objects, some of which were taken illicitly from communities. Repatriation, or the return of these objects to their homelands, is important for colonized people. While The Surrogates avoid replicating objects subject to repatriation, it highlights objects that museums commissioned that serve as their surrogates.
Stacked Landscapes
By stacking landscapes, Carlson brings sequence and time to painting, an artform often considered to be static, or fixed in time. The organization of the imagery in both Ink Babel and Red Exit resembles a wake left behind a boat, but moving in different directions. Red Exit is the celebratory foil to the somber themes of Ink Babel. In the third painting of this series, The Constant Sky found elsewhere in the exhibition imagery crisscrosses making an overall diamond-like pattern.
These works speak to ideas of possession, or rather the difficulty of possessing certain things. Their scale prohibits us from visually dominating them since we cannot take in the various scenes in a single instance. Each of the 60 panels suggests a film frame. Viewing the panels from top to bottom emulates the panning shots of cinematography allowing for a time-based sequence, while the horizontal panels recall a spatial panorama.
Ink Babel
2014
Ink and oil paint on paper
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago: Restricted gift of Emerge, 2021.12.a-hhh
The limited color palette and imagery of Ink Babel create a dystopian landscape where power structures reign, and displacement is requisite for survival. We find washing up on the shores animal imagery and references to towers and viewing platforms, ancient Egypt, and what Carlson refers to as the “zoom pig,” the only element that changes in scale. This visual chaos draws attention to the physical waste and figurative effects of colonialism and imperialism that have traveled across the horizon.
Red Exit
2020
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, and graphite pencil on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: Purchase, with funds from the Drawing and Print Committee, 2021.22a-f
This colorful work stands in contrast to the limited palette of Ink Babel, seen nearby. Red Exit is about survival and being present on one’s own terms. At the center of the work is a loon, one of the original Earth Divers of the Ojibwe re-creation story who fails to retrieve soil from the flooded earth. Imagery of various beings arriving or leaving the landscape ripple out from the center of the work.
Ancestor and Descendant
2023
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, graphite pencil, gouache (opaque watercolor), pastel, and watercolor on paper
Collection of the artist
In the Ojibwe language, the word indaanikoobijigan means both ancestor and descendant. Ancestry, then, is a continuum rather than hierarchical order. A more direct translation of the term is “one who is tied to me through the generations.”
Ancestor and Descendant suggests these generational connections between kin and offers what Carlson describes as a “kinscape.” The blue-palmed hands open in a gesture of reception, and the red patterns flanking the hands reference finger-woven sashes used as belts or for tethering things to someone’s body.
Columns for a Horizon
2024–25
Ash wood
Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery
These columns, created from milled wood and driftwood, serve as “spatial editors.” They obscure the view of what lies beyond—a physical intervention into the gallery space. From certain vantage points, they bar your physical access to the paintings hung nearby. As you move past the vertical sentinels, you see only a glimpse of what is concealed on the other side.
Hear Carlson talk about how her studies in linguistics, specifically Ojibwe, lead her to create artwork that is as dynamic as storytelling. In this video, she also speaks about her inspiration and the process behind the work in this exhibition.
Duration: 5 min. 09 sec.
Created by Steven J. Yazzie
Portage
2008
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, and graphite pencil on paper
Gochman Family Collection
Photo by Wes Battoclette, 2022, courtesy Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
The Tempest
2008
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, and graphite pencil on paper
Denver Art Museum: Gift of Brian A. Tschumper and Benton Greer, 2023.486A-P
Portage and The Tempest serve as portals to unreachable, painted landscapes. Framed by black and white patterns that draw the eye toward their centers, these works invite us in and keep us out at the same time. The patterns create a sense of urgency through their visual energy, but the serene landscape is painted, an illusion that is unreachable. These works serve as reminders of the limits of decolonization—a process that we move toward but may not fully realize.
Sunshine on a Cannibal
2015
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, graphite pencil, gouache (opaque watercolor), sumi ink, pastel, and watercolor on paper
Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art: The Mr. and Mrs. Bernard M. Granum Fund
In the margins of Sunshine on a Cannibal, art-historical references blend with a cinematic reference to the Italian film Mondo Cane (1962), which presents sensational, often fabricated, vignettes of cultural practices from around the world. The film includes footage from the 1961 making of Mondo Cane Shroud, a work by artist Yves Klein, in which nude women painted in ultramarine blue press their bodies on gauze. By entangling these references with text that reads “INSERT TRIGGER WARNING IN CASES WHERE THE SUBJECT IS ALSO THE PRIMARY AUDIENCE,” Carlson employs a “we see you” strategy that acknowledges the harmful actions of the filmmakers, while privileging the affected audience who bears witness.
VORE Series
With titles referencing films of the Italian cannibal boom genre of the 1980s, the Vore series metaphorically connects these horror films to the Windigo, an insatiable cannibal figure found in Anishinaabe storytelling. The paintings relate the consumption and greed of colonization to museums’ collecting practices and narratives of possession and ownership. This series interrogates colonizing imaginations, especially the fear of the unknown, which perpetuate violence against Indigenous peoples in their homelands.
In, the Vore series, Carlson placed the horizon lines of each work at the same height, allowing them all to be connected. This shared horizon line allows the series to keep growing infinitely.
The Constant Sky
2025
Oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, color pencil, graphite pencil, gouache, pastel, and watercolor on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery
The Constant Sky is a commissioned work for the Denver Art Museum. Carlson explains, “What we put out there in the world, things like songs, images, our emotional responses, and violence, can resound in the world for a long time. Our ideas might seem inconsequential or temporary, but they can survive us. The Constant Sky is a painting organized with cadence and rhythm. It is a shorescape with endless waves. It is a shore where images and texts have washed up without context but deep with history.”
Columns for a Horizon
Central to Carlson’s work, the horizon orients people around the world. It helps define our understanding of landscape, but as landscapes become defined regionally and nationally, they are more easily removed from our shared totality of the horizon.
Among two groupings of turned wooden columns sit two driftwood columns that feature wooden dowels protruding from scars left by former branches. The driftwood logs were retrieved from the shore of Lake Superior, where their north-facing sides likely had fewer branches. They are installed here to match their original orientation.
These poles relate to the horizon and shape our perception of it. They also complicate our access to the paintings hanging on the walls beyond them. In creating these visual obstructions, Carlson asks us to question what dictates our rights to access and ownership. Based on Indigenous visual culture like poles found at effigy mounds, these sculptures act as mediators, editing our access to and directs our perceptions of the world.
Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is presented with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Christensen Fund, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.
The Gallagher Gallery is sponsored by Your Six Front Range Toyota Stores.
All images are © Andrea Carlson, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis
