Carrie Elston

Biography:

Carrie has worked as an artist in New York for twenty years, focusing most recently on abstract painting. Her work is loose and gestural, with saturated compositions of bright color, blunt mark-making, and erasure. The layering implicit in her process is reflective of an emotional excavation, in which feelings and memories are built up over time, calcified, and later broken down. Carrie was awarded the New York Art Marathon Prize, a curatorial grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship.
She has held residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bronx Museum, NARS Foundation, Artists Alliance, and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. Carrie also works as an arts administrator, as the Director of Institutional Advancement for the Grammy-nominated choral ensemble, Voices of Ascension. She is the President of the Prospect Hill Foundation, and serves on the Advisory Board to the New York Philharmonic, the board of the Third Street Music School Settlement, and the Hunter Art Advisory Board.
She received her B.A. from Yale University and M.F.A. from Hunter College.
Carrie lives and works in the Bronx with her family.

Artist statement:

My work explores the interior space of abstract feeling and thinking, when the mind wanders. I am also interested in the defense mechanism of “undoing” – when we do things and then go back on them, attempting to cancel or reverse them by engaging in opposite or contrary behaviors.
These works inhabit the space between physical actions and the psychological effort to undo those already complete and irreversible actions, through the continued removal and covering up of paint. Using gestural movement and saturated compositions of bright color, blunt mark-making, and erasure, there is a passage of time implicit in the working of the paint, which is built up and then excavated, revealing buried color and form. The layering is reflective of an emotional excavation, in which memories are built up over time, become calcified, and are later uncovered, and exposed.
In recent years I came back to painting after a long time away from it, having gone through major personal upheaval. Facing a very different version of my life than the one I had known, I found that I had to become reacquainted with myself. I had to go beneath my own layers of artifice that had built up over the years in order to really recognize myself, and form my own intention.
This excavation of the self and undoing of the past is explored through a loose, raw, and immediate painting language, through which I am unearthing my own internal experience.