Biography • Carol Adelman
Carol Adelman is an artist working from observation and its imprint on her imagination in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Puzzled by the historical representation of women in art and culture from an early age, her work explores the gap between said representation and lived experience. The lifelong bedrock of her studio practice is the live study of the human form.
Born in the Bronx, NY, Carol Adelman has a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. While working on the education staff at the Phillips Collection in Wash. DC, her intimate relationship with the paintings became the foundation of her visual and historical vocabulary. At the University of Washington, where she earned her MFA, Adelman began to integrate critical theory into the development of her work.
Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Davidson Gallery, Meloy Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, Washington Studio Courtyard Gallery in Wash. DC, and the Bowery Gallery in New York among other venues. She has held academic appointments at Louisiana State University, Kutztown University, Dickinson College and the University of Washington School of Art. Carol Adelman is currently a member of Seattle’s Gallery 110 Collective.
Artist’s Statement
My work stretches traditional forms to encompass contemporary ideas of constructed identity and a fragmented self. I take a sensual, aggressive approach to my materials. approaching paint as both a liquid and as a sculptural material.
I am interested in the tenuous balancing act required to negotiate the gap between lived experience of the flesh and the norms projected by visual culture and art history. I work with growing root vegetables,angelic doll confections, and the mismatch between these metaphors for the body.
When I paint and repaint the sitter the object, the space, or myself, time passes. Every minute is unique. The impossibility of finding a fixed visual moment, a fixed conception of identity, or an edge, dogs my work. The act of painting becomes a practice of radical empathy, of walking within the skin of a person, an object, a space, or a historical practice. What remains is a residue–a history of overlapping moments and layered imagery that becomes a record of the consciousness that hangs between us.