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The Joy and Trauma of Jim Denomie’s Sketchbooks
March 4, 2022THE JOY AND TRAUMA OF JIM DENOMIE’S SKETCHBOOKS (2020)by Andrea Carlson“I am not a psychologist, nor a statistician, and less of a philosopher; but the depth of emotion, the dreads of fear, the referees of horrors, and the concentration of self that led me to make this observation,…
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Some interviews
October 22, 2021“Don’t look to my work for reconciliation”: A Conversation with Andrea Carlson. JeeYeun Lee. Monument Lab, July 26, 2021. https://monumentlab.com/bulletin/dont-look-to-my-work-for-reconciliation-a-conversation-with-andrea-carlson ______________________
Andrea Carlson artist profile, interview with Sheila Regan. First American Art Magazine. Summer 2018._______________________
Fett Magazine. Oslo, Norway, 2018 issue #3 Red in the Morning (English version, Norwegian translation…
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The Earth is Our Mothership (2020)
June 2, 2021The Earth is Our MothershipBy Andrea CarlsonI had to find another place where they hadn’t perceived Black people to be and that was on a spaceship. - George Clinton Earthbound. It’s trying to get up that gets us down. - Heid Erdrich, from the poem EarthboundWhen Grace Dillon,…
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Recent writings
May 26, 2021Mashkiig. An Anishinaabe (post)Apocalypse, June 25, 2020. Published with Rozalinda Borcila’s Swamp-Wetland-Bank. https://www.ny-web.be/artikels/mashkiig-an-anishinaabe-postapocalypse/ Sitting Bull’s Log Cabin and Settler Commons in Chicago, October 13, 2020. With Rozalinda Borcila. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/the-settler-colonial-present/353626/sitting-bull-s-log-cabin-and-settler-commons-in-chicago/ Where are the Native Artists at MCA? November 12, 2020. https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/where-are-the-native-artists-at-the-mca/
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Decolonization Questionaire
May 26, 2021https://direct.mit.edu/octo/issue/number/174 The October Journal editorial board asked if anti-imperialism was more urgent than decolonization practices within museums. The fall 2020 issue includes 35 responses to this question. The Long Knives by Andrea Carlson Before addressing decolonization or anti-imperialism, I want to consider how violent displacement is transformed. For Ojibwe People,…
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The Mississippi is the Opposite of the Anthropocene
February 18, 2020In the summer of 2019, I participated in the “Mississippi. An Anthropocene River” project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute. I wrote this essay on the inappropriateness of making the Mississippi River a mascot for the Anthropocene. Published January 2020 HEREFrom the…
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A note on ‘Anti-Retro’
May 29, 2019“Popular struggles have become not something that is happening now, but something that might always happen, in our system. And so they have to be set [in film] at a distance once again.” - Michel Foucault (“Anti-Retro” interview, Cahiers Du Cinéma 251-2:1974) The print Anti-Retro is about reframing the past.…
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A note on ‘Exit’
May 29, 2019“The West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place.” -Edouard Glissant (Caribbean Discourse, 1989:2) Based on one’s vantage point or cultural expectations, the significance of a place can become lost. The West as a colonial project, produced descriptions of the “Americas” as new land, a…
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Curatorial (2016)
June 10, 2018Curatorial (published for guest-edited special section of Transmotion Journal, University of Kent Vol 2, No 1&2, 2016) Someone, somewhere, long ago decided to smear one substance on to a substrate, and talk about it. That is the tradition I come from: mucking with things and talking about it. Sometimes this…
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Recent writings
May 2, 2018The Uncompromising Hand: Remembering Spirit Island Carlson, Andrea. 2018. “On The Uncompromising Hand: Remembering Spirit Island.” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 9. http://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/on-the-uncompromising-hand-remembering-spirit-island/.
A Mothership Connection: Past Futures of Resurrection and Absence Carlson, Andrea. 2018. “A Mothership Connection: Past Futures of Resurrection and Absence.” mplsart.com. https://www.mplsart.com/written/2018/02/a-mothership-connection-past-futures-of-resurrection-and-absence/.
Let’s…
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Let: an act of reverse incorporation
July 12, 2017So what of the title… Let: an act of reverse incorporation Let is to rent, to allow, to give passage. Let is “an expression that associates a condition or definition with a restricted scope.” The museum is a restricted scope. One condition associated with museum is concept “the West.” Edouard…
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An artist statement on VORE works
March 27, 2017In 2008 I made the painting that would launch my VORE series. The piece is Vaster Empire (2008) and the title references Sir Lewis Morris’s poem “A Song of Empire” that commemorates Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, June, 1887. “We hold a vaster Empire than has been!Nigh half the race of…
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A note on ‘Sunshine on a Cannibal’
March 26, 2017Sunshine on a Cannibal (2015) Suite of 24 paper panels, 44” x 180” “MONDO CANE”There are references in this work that are linked beyond being presented together in the painting Sunshine on a Cannibal: Yves Klein’s Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud, 1961) and the mondo-genre filmmakers Paolo…
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A note on INK BABEL
March 20, 2017Ink Babel 2014, installed at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, MB In the book Through the Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker comment on the episodic imagery depicted on vases of ancient Greece. They write, There is no point of view from which to look at a vase. The viewer…