Join me in my conversation with contemporary sculptor and visual arts gallery owner Melanie Carr. The show illuminates and explores two aspects of her artistic life; Carr’s geometric sculptural works and her platform to lift up and amplify the voices of other contemporary artists through her gallery, Melanie Carr Gallery in Essex, Connecticut.
Resources for this episode include The Art Story and Melanie Carr Gallery website. Follow Melanie on Instagram: @melaniecarrgallery and @melcarrstudio. Image credits: Melanie Carr.
Works highlighted in this episode include “Still I Breathe,” 2020 (Episode Image)
Melanie Carr Gallery: 1 North Main Street, Essex, CT
SCRIPT: Hello friends! Before we start the show I want share and promote an online art class led by the artist Ariana Tavares. She has been a guest on my show—Episode #106. Tavares paints in bright vivid colors close up views of plants and flowers. She will be teaching a Botanical Gouache Painting class on Saturday October 16 and Friday, October 22. Classes are a two-hour live online where you will learn how to paint botanicals in gouache at your own pace in your own home. You can sign up through eventbrite. I have added in the show notes links to the invitation plus a link to her website. I hope you can join Ariana and compose your own botanical works—part of the class will also include a mini-lesson in color theory. Please check it out— now onto today’s show!
Welcome to Episode 134: Mel Carr: Contemporary Art and the Human Experience “I am concerned and consumed with touch, geometry, interactivity, and human experience…” that is a short passage from the bio of female, Geometric Abstract artist Melanie Carr. This episode will illuminate two aspects of Mel’s artistic life and practice; her geometric sculptural works and her platform to lift up and amplify the voices of other contemporary artists, with a focus on women through her gallery, “Melanie Carr Gallery,” in Essex, Connecticut. This episode includes a conversation with the artist; she goes by Mel—in that dialogue we take a deeper dive into her role as a gallery owner and the ways she influences contemporary art, her impact, her fingerprint in the art world. Art is a window into another world and way to express yourself through the works you choose to invest in. She shared with me her desire to influence everyday folks to invest in contemporary art as living, breathing objects in their homes, their personal spaces.
I want to unpack that quote from her bio “concerned and consumed with touch, geometry, interactivity and human experience,” through the work or piece titled, “A Magical Garden of Make Believe.” The materials are canvas, acrylic, foam on board. It is installed on the wall, like a painting, though this sculptural, three dimensional work, unframed composed of individual forms that are seamed together. In between the attached forms we can see the white wall. The shapes are a hybrid of organic and geometric forms, from the left a light grey parallelogram shaped form that curves into a triangular shaped point — is attached to a sienna rust curved sloping form—shaped like the letter J, bumping up against that shape to the right is a navy blue form, two of its sides are composed of straight lines and angles that swell into a curvilinear line and right above is a smaller black rectangular shaped form.
What this composition of forms, shapes, textured in vinyl, in solid, contrasting colors does is “to explore a relationship between the forms, the wall space and the viewer’s expectations.” My looking experience is very interactive as I shift my gaze; I ponder, query, and contemplate, the “playful, plump, juicy and colorful vinyl objects.” Beyond the pictorial language in the viewer’s engagement with the sculptural work is in the materials, the medium.
Traditionally sculptures are made from durable, “noble” materials like bronze or marble. Artists in the early 20th century experimented with nontraditional materials. Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim’s fur covered tea cup, plate and spoon, evoked surprising mixed messages and associations; “wild nature of the fur and an object of civilization, the tea cup. In the late 1950s Claes Oldenburg experimented with materials like women’s stockings, latex, rubber and burlap to create everything from toilets, oversized BLT sandwich to cars and donuts. He employed these materials to create common objects in varying scales. He transforms the commonplace into something extraordinary. Carr through abstract, geometric and organic forms wrapped in distinctive individualized colors are not dialogue with us unlike Oppenheim and Oldenburg exploration of common, everyday objects, they speak to us and say things which cannot be said otherwise—The work Still I breath illustrates an emotive quality in Carr’s work.
Still I Breath, a paper, acrylic, glue work from 2020 is a relatively small wall work. Composed of three distinguished forms, black form is the largest, most dominant, appears like a squared-off lima bean, bright pink form—it’s shaped like a lozenge and the yellow, a curved smaller square. In between each shape there is a sliver of space…the forms are both connected, their edges line up to each other and yet separate—there is this delectable tension between the forms and I think the title informs and guides our looking experience—our interpretation is personal and intimate. Its pictorial language, emotes a magical elixir through its vibrant colors.
In 2011 I had the pleasure to engage with Carr’s Body Props project. Media is wood frame upholstered in vinyl. Life-sized red, white or blue covered geometric sculptural forms that invite us to feel, to lean into, to bring our sense of touch across our bodies to her multi-shaped individual props. Carr exhibited her Body Props project in a gallery space. As I entered the space, I became a curious explorer. The Monolinth, a red vinyl covered prop is shaped like a triangle, attached to one side the triangle diagonal form is rectangular form, jutting out resting on the floor. I leaned on the work, my back reclined against the the diagonal form of the triangle—I remember looking up into the gallery lights and feeling like an Egyptian pharaoh snug in my sarcophagus being transported to the god Ra.
The Body props project included a cluster of Plinths, –plinths are heavy bases holding a statue or vase—Carr’s plinths are lightweight three dimensional rectangular forms of blue, light grey and black. They invite the viewer to arrange and rearrange the Plinths, which I did, like a child playing with blocks. I wanted to lie across my arrangement of the plinths but felt held back, not by the objects or my playful arrangement, but by the crowd in the gallery. Carr’s Body Props in a public space invited inventiveness, interaction, play, levels of creative fun, yet I succumbed to the constraints of conforming to expected behavior in a gallery space. As I think about this 10 years later, I feel a little sad I did not seize the moment. In that space participants had the opportunity to “live with art, to live with contemporary art” or as Carr so eloquently describes as “being in a room full of thinkers.” Through geometric elemental forms Carr creates a pictorial language and a pictorial reality we the viewer can leap into, can wade our senses through, –the works provoke a dialogue with the visual expression beyond the decorative, beyond ornamental appearances. Join me in my conversation with Mel Carr.