Caitlin Carney is an abstract painter who makes light and color the central focus of her work. Her paintings contain intimations to landscapes and cloudscapes that are abstracted and made ephemeral. Taking field notes from different hours of the day, she forms a dreamlike archive of fleeting lights.
"In person, when you stand in front of the painting they have some movement depending on where you are standing in relation to them. As you move closer to the painting, the image becomes more distorted and as you step further away from the painting details begin to come into focus again. As you move to the left/ right the painting, there is lateral movement depending on where you are in relation to the work within a 180 degree range. I like to think of it as a dance between viewer and painting."
The vivid qualities of the paint and color on canvas are physically screened by an opaque membrane in order to sieve meaning from the hues. These hazy abstractions simultaneously offer visual shelter and confusion, as viewers move far away, close up, and to each side of the works, to experience an illusion of shifting illuminations.
Caitlin’s process includes experimenting with her own senses, painting and observing with and without her glasses on, and, in doing so, surrendering herself to an emotive experience of her environment. Through the blurriness, her paintings elicit a connection between color and memory that is both romantic and meditative.
