Absent Host

Andrea Carlson: Absent Host brings together recent paintings, sculpture, and video by Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent). Working in gouache, ink, oil paint, and color pencil on paper and birch bark, Carlson’s paintings act as a counterpoint to 19th-century American landscape painting and its role in justifying westward expansion and settlement. Across her paintings, the vast horizon where sky and Lake Superior meet acts as an organizing principle. Layered with images of land formations, animals, cowrie shells,Western statuary, Ojibwe weavings and other cultural objects, and more, Carlson’s multilayered, vibrant paintings evoke her ancestral homelands while also engaging Ojibwe origin and land narratives, colonial histories223 of erasure and land dispossession, and the sovereignty and resilience of Indigenous peoples. Her recent sculptures, as well as a collaborative two-channel video with Rozalinda Borcilǎ, allow her to extend these concerns into different media.

Carlson often creates large-scale works by assembling smaller works on paper. Each panel could be a unique, detailed painting on its own. They read almost like film cells; the entire work takes on a cinematic quality, with movement suggested through shifting, repeated imagery presented at different scales and locations across each sheet of paper. It’s not a surprise that some of the artist’s inspiration is drawn directly from film, in particular Italian cannibal films and the way they (mis)represent Indigenous peoples.

The exhibition’s title, Absent Host, speaks to the severed relationship between Indigenous peoples and their land, culture, and ancestral knowledge due to colonial practices of dispossession, erasure, forced assimilation, and genocide. In Carlson’s works, images of land, animals, cultural objects, stories, and memories sometimes appear fragmented, but they are always reassembled, reinterpreted, and carried forward to imagine a new future.