Excerpt from Material Choreography
By Jason Stopa
Nanette Carter (b. 1954) is an artist uninterested in labels. She uses collage as construction, weaving together disparate materials to form new social relationships. This has a long tradition. Her influences include Romare Bearden’s transformation of everyday magazines into colorful photomontage and Frank Wimberley’s use of non-traditional materials like sawdust. Since the 1990s, the artist has been working with Mylar, paper, and oils. Architects began using Mylar in the 1950s, a material with a frosted texture allowing pigment to adhere but not saturate. It lends each work a frontal, non-recessive quality. Carter alternates from painting on the wall, working on the floor, and using materials at her desk. This kind of staccato rhythm, also evident in her studio jazz playlists, plays out in the formal resolution of her works which are improvisational and responsive. Working on the grid, her paintings read as stacks; gestural forms repeat like phrases, and motifs often resemble totem-like structures. The works she made during the 2020 pandemic explore the semiotics of form where the choreography of color and materiality mirror the structure of spoken language–slang, a formal expression or a dirge...
Essay by Jason Stopa
Designed by Mark Robinson
Photography by Roz Akin
Published by Berry Campbell and printed by GHP Media
