Carmen Neely

Carmen Neely, born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1987 now lives and works between Chicago and Mexico City.

For Neely, the difference between two types of line is not a precious commitment to formal questions that lead nowhere beyond the canvas; rather, these marks are an earnest attempt to address real challenges in expressing one’s own history and the histories passed through us by the act of mark-making.

Neely’s canvases are surfaces taut with conflict, line, colour, and language. The marks ricochet and collide with one another, their meanings always shaped by their proximity to other gestures. In Neely’s paintings, memory, speech, and feeling are not necessarily linear or discrete expressions or experiences, but are instead interdependent—subject to a series of contexts that produce, interrupt, and reform them over time.

Her paintings evoke a sense of catharsis, bursting with colourful, calligraphic strokes set against delicate, soft backgrounds. The tableaux propose a kind of peace found through ongoing processes of renegotiation and reiteration. If each line contains expressions of identity, values, and memories passed down through generations of family and friendship, Neely’s continual modulation of gesture and colour within her own visual vernacular suggests the mutability and evolution of these values across time and geography. The process concerns the intricacies of interpretation, with the resulting works expressing a methodological approach to language that remains open and vulnerable to Neely’s ongoing confrontation with selfhood.

Neely holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and her work is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), the University of North Carolina (Charlotte, NC), and the Plattsburgh State Museum of Art (New York, NY). She is currently an adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.