Absent Host

Andrea Carlson: Absent Host brings together recent paintings, sculpture, and video by Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent). Working in gouache, ink, oil paint, and color pencil on paper and birch bark, Carlson’s paintings act as a counterpoint to 19th-century American landscape painting and its role in justifying westward expansion and settlement. Across her paintings, the vast horizon where sky and Lake Superior meet acts as an organizing principle. Layered with images of land formations, animals, cowrie shells,Western statuary, Ojibwe weavings and other cultural objects, and more, Carlson’s multilayered, vibrant paintings evoke her ancestral homelands while also engaging Ojibwe origin and land narratives, colonial histories223 of erasure and land dispossession, and the sovereignty and resilience of Indigenous peoples. Her recent sculptures, as well as a collaborative two-channel video with Rozalinda Borcilǎ, allow her to extend these concerns into different media. 

Carlson often creates large-scale works by assembling smaller works on paper. Each panel could be a unique, detailed painting on its own. They read almost like film cells; the entire work takes on a cinematic quality, with movement suggested through shifting, repeated imagery presented at different scales and locations across each sheet of paper. It’s not a surprise that some of the artist’s inspiration is drawn directly from film, in particular Italian cannibal films and the way they (mis)represent Indigenous peoples.

In Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 – Nibi Ezhi-Nisidawaabanjigaade Ozhibii’igewin 071200, land dispossession, treaties, and ongoing environmental concerns come together through Carlson’s exploration of the relationship between land, ownership, and resource extraction. In Low Relief Mound, her engagement with institutional practices surrounding the ownership and care of Indigenous cultural material is realized through a carved wooden sculpture, bringing the forms of effigy staffs and mounds into an institutional space for deeper consideration.

The exhibition’s title, Absent Host, speaks to the severed relationship between Indigenous peoples and their land, culture, and ancestral knowledge due to colonial practices of dispossession, erasure, forced assimilation, and genocide. In Carlson’s works, images of land, animals, cultural objects, stories, and memories sometimes appear fragmented, but they are always reassembled, reinterpreted, and carried forward to imagine a new future.

Currently based in Northern Minnesota, Andrea Carlson earned her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and BA from the University of Minnesota. Carlson has enjoyed recent solo exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, CO; Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, MO; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; MCA Chicago; and University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AK; the Toronto Biennial; and Prospect.6, New Orleans, LA. Carlson’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; MCA Chicago; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and the British Museum, London, among others. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, United States Artists Fellowship, and Chicago Artadia Award. Carlson is co-founder of the Center for Native Futures in Chicago, an art space dedicated to the work of Native artists.