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Contact: Mary Jane Dunlap, University Relations, (785) 864-8853.

Artist's show steps into cultural questions

LAWRENCE -- University of Kansas artist Carol Ann Carter's work reflects journeys in a search for home that have meant crossing cultural and professional borders and breaking bonds of social conventions.

An exhibition of installation art titled "Journal Entries: Words and Pictures" that includes work by Carter, KU professor of art, and Jamie Pawlus, KU graduate student in art, runs Jan. 5 to March 4 at Washburn University's Mulvane Art Museum, 17th and Jewell, Topeka.

Installation art addresses the interaction between objects, humans and their context in time and space. Carter describes the works in the installation as "a wordless expression of having reached for and touched home on occasion."

Carter combines mixed-media drawing, painting, fiber construction and video performance art. Her voice, singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," is heard in the gallery. Carter says she began humming the tune after seeing a rainbow and used the music in her video performance. Until preparing for the exhibition, Carter notes, "I didn't make the connection of Oz, Kansas and 'no place like home.'"

Carter asked Pawlus to join her in the show because she believed their works would interact with each other and because collaborative research is common in academia. Both artists explore themes involving power and powerlessness. Carter notes that she and Pawlus both draw inspiration from relationships with family and friends for their work; keep journals that enter their work; and have undergraduate degrees from Herron School of Art at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

In her search for home -- more a feeling of belonging rather than a place -- Indianapolis-born Carter has traveled outside the United States. She discovered "home resided in my relationship with my work partners."

Two specific journeys radicalized her work, says Carter who came to KU in 1995 as the Langston Hughes visiting professor. In 1984, with a Lilly Foundation Open Faculty Fellowship, she made a sabbatical trip to Nigeria seeking a cultural parallel as an American artist with African heritage. Ten years later, Carter went to Stockholm as a Fulbright Fellow seeking a cultural complement to help her understand her space in contemporary Western culture.

"In Scandinavia, I made an unexpectedly pleasant discovery. I found people are more alike than we are different."

Carter subsequently began collaborating across disciplines, combining painting with design and performance art and teaming with artists and designers.

"The works assembled for my portion of the show reflect temporal positions of personal and cultural identity," Carter notes. Those positions include passage from her core childhood and family culture in Indianapolis from the 1950s to the1970s to the wider influences of art and cultural circles, the 1980s and the past decade.

The show explores points of contact between past and present, life and art, art and design, and black and white, and feelings of moving from inside to outside cultural borders.

In her Bundle Paintings, Carter stretches a canvas membrane over tightly bound remnants of paintings, fabric, prints, letters and lists, for example, bundled into a torso shape. She paints the canvas membrane, often using arabesque designs reminiscent of her mother's elegant needlework. "It's a beautiful surface that covers a less elegant interior."

Carter contrasts the Bundle Paintings with large panel paintings, tiny baby shoe forms and a video performance art piece entitled "Mouthpeace." Each represents movement, change and freedom -- change that is inevitably accompanied by pain, she explains.

Her panel paintings reflect freedom and breathing space not possible in the tightly-bound bundles. The video performance art expresses concepts of breaking bonds of social conventions imposed on the individual.

The baby shoe forms represent both pain of recent foot surgery Carter has undergone and of a loss of mobility. The forms evolved as Carter focused on finding comfortable non-binding shoes. Recognizing that she had a wide foot and that baby shoes are designed to be wide, Carter began creating the forms as prototypes of shoes she hopes to design for women.

The baby shoes also represent Carter's desire to collaborate across disciplines within the art world. "Designers work in teams. Architects work in teams. Artists work alone. Because I am not a purist, I visualize my work overlapping, crossing these disciplines."

Carter came to KU as the 1995 Langston Hughes visiting professor of art from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has a M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame. Previously she has taught at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind., and Pennsylvania State University.