• CARMEN NEELY

    A TRACE BEYOND THE LIFE OF THE BODY

     

    February 2 - May 2, 2025
    Mexico City
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    Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Carmen Neely entitled, a trace beyond the life of the body, in Mexico City. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in Latin America and her third with the gallery, the exhibition unfolds at a focal moment in Neely’s practice, as she now divides her time between Chicago and Mexico City.  
     
    Intimately connected to writing, Neely’s painting emerges as a form of inscription: one that unfolds on canvases prepared with a transparent primer or, for the first time in this exhibition, with a light beige ground that recalls the raw canvas she has long favoured. This subtle chromatic shift acts as a conceptual threshold: neither blank nor fully neutral, the surface becomes a site where change is tensely negotiated.  
  • INSTALLATION VIEWS

  • ARTWORKS

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    The works presented in Carmen Neely’s a trace beyond the life of the body arise from what the artist describes as an unanswerable question: how to uphold memory while also upholding truth. Vibrant traces and calligraphic lines negotiate continuously with negative space through gestures that remain intuitive. The traces of erasure do not simply leave voids; they register blocked information, subtle disruptions that insist on being seen. Through acts of addition and subtraction, Neely emphasizes the necessity of negative space, not as absence, but as a marker of what is missing. 

     

    Alongside the canvases, the exhibition includes a series of drawings on paper, where similar tensions are explored on a more intimate scale. Here, intensity and confusion are distilled into a quieter register, allowing the viewer to encounter the instability of language and memory in closer proximity. 

     

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    "Speech leaves no mark in space; like gesture it exists in its immediate context and can reappear only in another’s voice, another’s body, even if that other is the same speaker transformed by history. But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. Thus, while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body. Our terror of the unmarked grave is the terror of insignificance of a world without writing. The metaphor of the unmarked grave is one which joins the mute and the ambivalent; without the mark there is no boundary, no point at which to begin the repetition. Writing gives us a device for inscribing space, for inscribing nature: the lovers' names carved in bark, the slogans on the bridge, and the strangely uniform and idiosyncratic hand that has tattooed the subways. Writing serves to capture the world, defining and commenting upon the configurations we choose to textualize. If writing is an imitation of speech, it is also a “script,” as a marking of speech in space which can be taken up through time in varying contexts.  The space between letters, the space between words, bears no hesitations of the body; it has only the hesitations of knowing, the hesitations which arise from its place outside history - transcendent yet lacking the substantiating power of context "  

     

    Susan Stewart, On Longing. Duke University Press, 1993. p. 31 

  • ABOUT THE ARTIST

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    Carmen Neely (b. 1987 in Charlotte, North Carolina; lives and works between Chicago and Mexico City) trades in semantics. For Neely, the difference between two types of line is not so much a precious commitment to formal queries that lead nowhere outside of the canvas; rather these marks are an earnest stab at solving real problems in expressing one’s own history and the histories that are passed through us by the act of mark making.  

     

    Neely’s canvases are surfaces taught with conflict, line, color and language. The marks ricochet and collide off one another, their meanings always affected by their proximity to other gestures. In Neely’s paintings, memory, speech, and feeling are not necessarily linear or discrete expressions and experiences but are rather codependent on a series of contexts that produce, interrupt and re-form them over time. 

     

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  • Carmen Neely

    a trace beyond the life of the body I Artist Studio
    El uso de cinta adhesiva como herramienta compositiva, aplicada entre capas de pintura y retirada posteriormente, es introducido en esta exposición por Neely para revelar spacios negativos que remiten a...
  • MONOGRAPH

  • With contributions by Leasho Johnson, Gervais Marsh and Marisol Rodríguez Available in English and French The monograph celebrates Carmen Neely's...

    With contributions by Leasho Johnson, Gervais Marsh and Marisol Rodríguez

    Available in English and French

     

    The monograph celebrates Carmen Neely's career and her work to date. Providing a full record of the artist's work, the book captures the oeuvre of Neely with a compilation of her paintings between 2021 – 2024. The book was released in honor of her solo exhibition in Paris, chronic conditions (October 2024).