"The Present Moment of the Past"
Paintings
Caren Canier
Curator: Margaret Kuntz
Exhibit: March 24 – April 18, 2009
Opening Reception: April 3, 2009, 5:30-8:00 PM
For more information please contact:
(973) 408 - 3758 or email: ghiltlco@drew.edu
The Korn Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of paintings by Caren Canier which will be on view from March 24 through April 17, 2009. The work is located in the Korn Gallery in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University. The Gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 12:30-4:00 PM and by appointment.
Caren Canier is a painter who lives and works in Troy, New York. Her paintings draw from nature, art, historical sources, as well as images from her own family history. The paintings reflect on the influence of past memories on our present consciousness. Caren Canier received a BFA from Cornell University and a MFA from Boston University. She was awarded a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant, received the Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and won the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. Ms. Canier has had many solo shows in the United States and Italy. She is a Professor in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
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"The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919
In the spirit of T. S. Eliot’s remarks, my work often references art historical or literary sources. The classical world and the Italian Renaissance have been pervasive influences along with early and contemporary photographic images from books and magazines. In particular, the studies of figures and animals in motion by the nineteenth century photographer Eadweard Muybridge have provided an endless source of visual material. Recently I’ve also borrowed imagery from my own family history, using snapshots from the 1940’s and 50’s. I’ve developed a working process with which I make collages of photographs and other printed matter that are then developed through painting to create textured stories about our experience of time, history and memory.
The paintings exhibited are explorations about the way in which memories and ghosts from the past, personal and collective, old and recent cohabit in our minds and inform our lives. Images and feelings from different periods of personal experience mingle with collective histories to create unexpected juxtapositions and connections. The intersection of modern and ancient life is a subject that has intrigued me since spending time in Italy and experiencing the layered evidence of history in the Mediterranean. I was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1977-78 and have returned yearly to Italy since then.
American Salon and some of the smaller studies are in homage to the sculptor Elie Nadelman whose classical European training was infused with influences from American folk art when he came to the USA in the early twentieth century. The Fancy Dress Ball, and Study for the Fancy Dress Ball refer to Tommaso de Lampedusa’s classic novel about 19th century Sicily, The Leopard. In these paintings I offer some observations about the artifice of social forms in our culture. My Family (1953) and Our Happily Ever After Begins are autobiographical, drawing on compilations of family photos. Ulysses is about James Joyce’s masterpiece. In this painting I tried to convey a sense of the multi layered journey of Leopold Bloom through a fragmented juxtaposition of images from the Odyssey. Many of the smaller paintings are musings about Italian cities and towns and the timeless place they occupy in the modern imagination.
