MOLTEN
CARISSA KARAMARKO
MOLTEN
13 – 24 April 2022
Opening night: Wednesday 13th April, 6 – 8 pm
Meet the Artist: Saturday 16th April, 11am – 2pm
Catalogue & Price List: View PDF Catalogue (3.2 Mb)
Gilbert: “Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Ernest: “His punishment?”
Gilbert: “And his reward.”
Intentions By Oscar Wilde, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1891,
The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks Upon The Importance Of Discussing Everything, Part II, P. 217
Saint Cloche warmly welcomes back Melbourne based artist Carissa Karamarko with ‘Molten’, an exhibition celebrating the mind of a dreamer, of dipping out of reality to plunge deep into the frivolous gifts offered up by life; the way the light catches, an arrangement of objects transformed into a monster under the shade of moonlight.
Carrisa’s practice employs the genre of still life to delve deeply into colour, intersecting different spheres and life experiences through objecthood. The works vary in levels of abstraction, so too does the clarity of the objects – there is a latency or hiddenness. The imagination is awakened through hyper focus on objects and the resulting changes in scale, proportion, and setting. It echoes being deep in the mind, observing as objects blend with their surrounds and then the opposite; the object moving to the forefront whilst everything else fades into a blur of colour and shape. This gives rise to an array of ghost objects to be uncovered throughout the collection.
“Molten is an exploration of worlds within worlds and sinking deep into one’s imagination. It draws from a collection of personal experiences in which my propensity to daydream has transformed banal moments into extravagant narratives. It follows my journey down familiar streets, at familiar tables, and in familiar scenes all made new by an imaginative mind.
Whilst the series is grounded in Still Life, the genre is enmeshed with Abstractionism to illustrate the translation of the real-world landscape into the manipulations of the brain. The painted objects are the catalyst for the imaginative narrative whilst the abstraction – the colours, textures, the movement – exist to represent the transition of the real to the imagined. It is to illustrate the ways in which the brain pulls an object into a reality of one’s own where everything is slightly askew, colours are not quite right, scale is manipulated; much like a dreamscape.
The detail is not lost in rumination but replaced with fragments of other memories and guesstimates of the mind. There are interventions of light throughout the dreamscapes of hidden naturalism, streaming across uniformly, as though sprawled across a table, or in harsh bursts as seen through a reflection or the corner of a window.
In this body of work, light is represented in a variety of colours – yellow, pink, brown, blue – another manipulation of the mind and so a true representation is less valuable to the concept.”
~ Carissa Karamarko
About Carissa Karamarko
Carissa’s artworks extend a relationship between how objects dictate our view on history, particular moments in time and how they can provide a window into a world unseen. Carissa relates this to her own surroundings and the items she curates. Yet, critically, her investigation of objects sets out to understand different worlds and different people.
Within her still life paintings, we see a close connection to colour, one that relates to her discovery of herself in her formative days. This relationship with colour follows an intuitive process; Carissa typically begins her process with photographs, capturing the composition and framing through her eye. She works directly from these images, painting onto canvas with oils, in an automatic process, working quickly, acting intuitively, and trusting the process.
Carissa has been a finalist in numerous art prizes, including the Geelong Contemporary Art Award, Muswellbrook Art Prize, and the Mosman Art Award. Her work is held in collections across Australia.
Carissa is represented by Saint Cloche, we are delighted to reveal her third Sydney solo presentation.
