Carrie Iverson

BIOGRAPHY
Carrie Iverson is a printmaker and glass artist who often combines both media into multi-part installations. She received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in many private and public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), The Museum of Modern Art, (New York, NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art (Richmond, VA). Her current focus in her work is adapting and translating printmaking processes into glass through research and experimentation.

ARTIST STATEMENT
When does something become so fine it disappears? Layers of dust sift over the edges of books, on the periphery of furniture, in the corners. Hair and skin ground down into a fine powder, an ongoing residue. Paper drifting on the wood floor, gathered and burnt, turned into ash yet still a ghost.

My work reflects the process of transition – objects in motion, imagery submerged just below the surface, the traces of an explosion. I am interested in examining how evidence is presented, how events are reconstructed.

My recent glass works incorporate hair, ash, and debris, discarded ephemera suggestive of their owners' histories. Some of the pieces have a semi-opaque surface which acts as a skin or veil that momentarily intrudes into your reception of seeing the piece.

Glass is such an evocative medium, simultaneously delicate and harsh. That tension and vulnerability seems particularly appropriate for reflecting on the fragile and shifting quality of memory. I am also intrigued by its traditional uses as a barrier and as a means of preservation, as a protective material that holds perishables like food and drink yet is meant to be touched.

By its reactive nature glass is a natural palimpsest; the development of the image remains in the final piece, making it a reflection of the process of sorting memory itself.
Carrie Iverson
2008

Contact Information
http://www.zahrada.org/

Cartography, kilnfused glass, 17” x 20," 2008	Catalyst, installation comprised of glass, prints, a light box, and site specific piece installed at FLATFILE galleries (Chicago, IL), 2007.	Coda, kilncast glass, left: 9" x 6" x .5," right: 11" x 6" x .5," 2008
Systemic, hand-dyed lithographs, 37 prints, each 7” x 30,” 2008.		Facade Project, laser print outs and tape. Three story site specific memorial to the US servicemen and women killed in Iraq. 2004-present. On the facade of the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative building, Chicago, IL.

Catalog Essay by Lisa Stein
for "Survey: Carrie Iverson,"
College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL, 2008

For Carrie Iverson, making art is a process of distilling experience and movement in ways that, when completed, challenge us to examine our construction of memory: how we remember, what we remember and what meaning lies therein. Her primary medium of printmaking gives her the ideal tools for investigating the concept of memory from a variety of perspectives.

Iverson's art inextricably links method to subject matter. Printmaking by nature serves as a record of the artmaking process, with the plate's soft ground retaining even the slightest imprints made on it-a fingerprint, the subtle grid on a sheet of paper, the weave of cloth. Iverson overlaps images, so that many of the works on view provide a palimpsest-an image superimposed over a partly erased one, in such a way that the old image can be seen beneath the new. In this way the artist supplies us with a metaphor for shifting layers of memory that must be acknowledged, sorted through and integrated.

The beauty of Iverson's work lies in its combination of masterful printmaking with groundbreaking techniques, innovative materials and contemporary subject matter. While Iverson embraces traditional printmaking methods such as lithography, she also shows a strong conceptual bent in her work and continuously searches for new ways to present a scope of ideas. Whether producing individual works or site- specific installations, printmaking is the platform from which she starts, the first step in a quest for the most suitable materials and techniques. For example, in the past she has integrated objects such as fabric, strings, anorthoscopes and photography into her installations.

Iverson's most recent body of work incorporates glass to evoke fragility and impenetrability, the hallmarks of memory. She studied glassmaking for several months last year at the Portland, Oregon-based Bullseye Glass Company, which teaches the art of kilnformed glass to artists from around the world. From that experience she began to create glass tiles by drawing on shcct glass with ground glass in a water dropper, and then firing the work in a kiln. The color of the finished glass varies from milky white to gray to beige depending on the type of glass, temperature and time spent in the kiln.

Among the glass tiles on view in this exhibition is an untitled series of ten squares that, when viewed as a whole, present images recalling the detritus of violence. One layered, circular shape looks like an explosion trapped under ice. Others appear to suggest, alternately, residue from gunpowder, ashes smeared into wrinkles of skin, bullet holes, and pieces of wire and other metal objects (perhaps lodged in a human body) through an X-ray. The range of colors in the glass brings to mind old photographs and film stills. Through suggestion and juxtaposition of tiles, this series iterates Iverson's investigation of memory: the eye tries to penetrate the clouds and shadows, reveal what's lurking below the surface. The mind pushes relentlessly to make sense of the record of events presented before it. What happened to create such an image? What's that shape lurking behind a filmy veil? Does a group of seemingly random marks contain any pattern? Such investigations lead us to ask: How we can ever grasp with certainty the truth of past events both personal and collective? By extension, Iverson implies that how we choose to interpret our memories and present them to others determines their importance and meaning: framing is everything.

Another etching, a slightly larger diptych that is part of the installation Catalyst, also-deals with an explosion of some kind. On the left tile is a canister depicted at the moment it bursts apart; the violence of the object ripping in two is strangely unsettling. On the right are rows of partially obscured objects that resemble dental records or staples set against a background of paper, its woven grid visible. The work presents two extremes- violence and stasis, which happen to be the two components of war.

Also related to war is a series of four military vehicle windows that gives us another example of Iverson's wide-ranging use of materials. Bought at a science surplus store, the windows are reflective, making them jarringly interactive. Iverson screen- printed the backs of the windows with black swirls that create shadows and result in an ominous affect.

Iverson's interest in memory has led her, maybe inevitably given our conflict-ridden times, to memorial. In summer 2004 she created the Fagade Project at the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative as a memorial to U.S. soldiers killed since the occupation of Iraq. The public art project consists of 648 black-and-white photographs placed in three stories of windows of a warehouse (the death toll of U.S. soldiers as of January 2008 is more than 3,900). Iverson has said that she wanted to put faces on some of the people who had died in the conflict at that point, to individualize and personalize the sacrifices that had been made and continue to be made. The photos have begun to fade in the years since Iverson created the work, providing another analogy for the nature of memory. Her 2006 exhibitions of the installation Wake at a gallery in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Public Library similarly commemorated the deaths of Iraqis as well as U.S. soldiers in the war. Black-and-white photos of soldiers lined the walls in both venues; without portraits or names of almost every Iraqi who died in the war, she substituted a blank sheet of white paper for every Iraqi killed.

In the installation Systemic, Iverson tackles some of the same tough questions: How do you meaningfully represent the legions killed in a catastrophe? How do you honor their lives? In short, how do you remember them? Iverson set out in this work to respond to the 2004 tsunami caused by an Indian Ocean earthquake that claimed the lives of more than 225,000 in eleven countries. As she planned the work she began thinking of systems designed to represent large numbers of people. She started by dyeing sheets of paper blue and green-colors of the ocean- and then printed them with images that communicate the idea of vast numbers: pages from telephone books, aerial maps spanning large distances, a frame from random video footage taken at a busy airport in Mexico. Because of the printmaking process the images appear in reverse, so that names and numbers are backwards. Again, Iverson makes use of printmaking to emphasize her fascination with memory; we see all evidence and images in her works as if through a rear view mirror, signposts we have passed as we move on down the road yet mentally return to again and again.

Iverson recently began emphasizing "accidents" that occur while printing. When enlarged or featured prominently in a work, mistakes such as toner streaks and dust specks from copy machines as well as distortions in a camera lens suggest the fallibility of technology. No matter its tremendous influence or omnipresence in our daily lives, technology, like memory, can be undependable and comes with its own risks.

Whether dealing with such subjects as natural catastrophes, medical technology or war, Iverson's investigations into memory move beyond events to study our intellectual and emotional responses to them. Her works always reflect her relentless pursuit of new techniques and media while at the same time acknowledging the rich tradition of printmaking. By allowing complexity to flourish she gives us the opportunity for multiple interpretations, as she asserts all the while that memory is in the eye of the beholder.

Lisa Stein, a freelance writer, writes regularly about visual art for ArtNews and the Chicago Tribune as well as other publications.