Pink Worlds May 23, 2008

Pink Worlds and White Icing, a collection of poems written by a twelve-year-old girl in the late sixties, stands as the point of initiation for this collection of recent work by artists Carlson and Gehweiler. Awash in preteen nostalgia, strangely baroque as well as alternately naive, precocious, and deeply introspective, these tiny poems are about “color, the Beatles, bubblegum, nature and the universe”. They lend both a perfect title and a rich backdrop to this exhibition of candy-colored dreamscapes and imaginary narratives within the realm of head-in-the-clouds teenage psychedelia. The paintings engender a nuanced sensibility of the pastoral, pretty and pop while simultaneously embracing subtexts of dark comedy.

Widely considered a major influence in the recent explosion of young feminine art in the United States, Fawn Gehweiler’s aesthetic hinges on a delicate balance of past and present, building obsessive narratives through personal artifacts that reflect the imaginary worlds of little girls, treading the fine line between wide eyed innocence and dark fairy tales.

Dana Carlson enhances traditional painting techniques with embroidery, beadwork, and appliqué to create hybrid, handiworked dream worlds. Her intricate paintings conjure up a pretty, Romantic absurdity that is part down-home psychedelia, part angst-infused gesture painting, and part earnest teenager.

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