Review: Andrea Carlson at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Throughout her diverse practice, Carlson (who is of Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent) combines histories of dispossession and destruction with images of Indigenous presence and renewal in landscapes simultaneously real and invented. Inspired by the terrain of her native Minnesota, Anishinaabe storytelling, and popular culture and film, the artist realizes her reimagined vistas in a variety of media, including this exhibition’s one sculpture and four paintings. The layered strata of Carlson’s video give way in her two-dimensional works to rectangular panes of heavyweight cotton paper. Each one contains a cacophony of images—ranging from shorelines and mounds to animals and flora to masks and cowrie shells—arranged in tiered rows to form one large painting. Carlson’s symbolic motifs are rendered in oil, acrylic, gouache, ink, colored pencil, and graphite, all of which remarkably retain the mark of the artist’s hand despite their collage-like overlays and repeated appearances across multiple compositions. 

Full piece: