Exhibition
Carly Burnell
changeling
March 10 - May 6, 2023
Opening Friday, March 10th, 6-8pm
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce changeling, Brooklyn based painter, Carly Burnell’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Burnell’s deeply personal painting practice features combinations of unorthodox painting material. Oil paint is often mixed or layered with resin, wax, or silicone, to produce unique tones, textures, and levels of transparencies. The results are both subtle yet complex and unpredictable.
The paintings are not strictly formal nor explicitly depictive. The formal attributes that make up a painting - color, line, texture, weight, simultaneously imply and obscure subject matter. Although the process is rooted in abstraction, their earthy tones and craggy patinas suggest landscapes. For Burnell, the veneer of landscape is employed as a signifier for space, a visual portrayal of emptiness. A presence of absence
The potential for likeness also creates a different kind of space - space as an opening or an invitation. The material cycle of creation, effacement, and embalmment is a ritual during which the artist gradually processes and imbues her own meaning into the work. Ultimately the paintings are rooms that remain open while nudging towards possibilities personal to both the artist and the viewer.
Artist Bio
Carly Burnell is a painter from Santa Barbara, CA, currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her BFA in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School of Design in 2015 and received her Masters in Studio Art from New York University in 2017. Burnell’s work has been included in several group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Nashville. She was featured on David Zwirner’s Platform in 2021. In 2019 Burnell had a solo exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; a solo exhibition at the gallery cfcp, Brooklyn, in 2018; and a solo exhibition at 80WSE Gallery Project Space, NY, in 2016. Burnell is also a writer and performs with Stanley Love Performance Group.