Nanette Carter, The Group #3, 2024, Oil, oil stick, Mylar. 20 × 20 inches
"Nanette Carter makes eloquent, inventive collages, ambiguous meditations on her heritage as a Black American and the history of modernism. She builds her works with expressive cutout shapes, combining oil, oil stick, and pencil on Mylar to produce subtly textured and patterned light-reflective surfaces. These flat components, at different scales, can become generous, wall-mounted free-form works, such as the declarative ongoing Destabilizing series (2024)—or intimate, neatly bounded images, such as the Group series (2023 and 2024). Often, as in the blocky, irregularly shaped Destabilizing collages, Carter allows the unpredictable perimeters of her shapes to determine the limits of the finished construction, assembling the cutouts like the planes of a welded sculpture and floating them on the wall, free from the confines of a rectangular support. A range of textures—scratchy, combed, rhythmic, smooth, staccato—reminds us of the history of the work's making, yet this range may also puzzle us because we can't quite grasp how each effect was achieved. We can sense the action of the hand in creating some of what we see, but often the origin of the irregular patterning remains mysterious, so that we are simply forced to capitulate to its visual allure. The variations in the surface, the character of the shapes, and the layering of the elements, along with casual references to illusionism, conspire with the lively color to create a fleeting sense of three-dimensionality—now you see it, now you don't."
— Karen Wilkin
Spring 2025
