Carmen Neely received her BFA from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2012, and MFA from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2016. She has completed residencies at Sparkbox Studio, Ontario CN, and Vermont Studio Center, VT. Recent exhibitions include: it makes it more so if you say so, Jane Lombard Gallery, NY; my fossil / my echo / my excess / my scrap, MX Gallery, NY; 17 feet away, Lump, Raleigh, NC. She is represented by Jane Lombard Gallery, NY and currently teaches at Rowan-Cabarrus Community Community College.
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Coming from a lineage of sentimental black matriarchs who savored their possessions for decades, valuing each hat, salt shaker, and blanket as an eternal vessel for the spirit, it is only natural that the majority of objects in my world carry significant emotional weight. In an effort to retain memories, events, conversations, and people, I collect random things. Collecting is about savoring experiences and each object operates as a type of marker for places and incidents that would otherwise risk being forgotten. Objects in my life have served as placeholders, trophies, reminders, friends, symbols, warnings, and metaphors for nonverbal gestures. The work I make is a result of this emphasis on both reflecting and relishing. Paintings and drawings serve as a means of “visual paraphrasing”, relying on gestures that allude to personal specifics and formal relationships that embody memories. These narratives also undergo material translations – where a painterly stroke becomes a three-dimensional clay form, which is then flattened as a photographic image, and/or laser-cut into a plexiglass shape – evolving the painterly gesture into a tangible object to be collected.