Carmen Neely

Carmen Neely's (b. 1987 in Charlotte, North Carolina; lives and works between Chicago, IL, and Mexico City, Mexico) canvases are surfaces taut with conflict, line, color, and language. The marks ricochet and collide with one another, their meanings continually shaped by their proximity to other gestures. In Neely’s paintings, memory, speech, and feeling are not necessarily linear or discrete expressions and experiences; rather, they are codependent on a series of contexts that produce, interrupt, and reform them over time.

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

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

She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Greensboro, NC), and since 2013 she has participated in artist residencies at the McColl Center (Charlotte, NC), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Spark Box Studio (Picton, Ontario, Canada), and Greensboro Project Space (Greensboro, NC). 

Her work is held in the collections of the Cameron Art Museum (Wilmington, NC), the Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), the Plattsburgh State Art Museum (Plattsburgh, NY), and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Performing Arts Center (Charlotte, NC).