Ken Artspace presents Someone I Know, a solo exhibition of watercolour heads by Andrew Carnie. These watercolours are an ongoing project, something Carnie has been completing regularly, but only recently presented to the public. As he explains: "If you 'see' and try to 'understand' the world through images, you need to make them".
Carnie is best known for his large-scale video projection works, based on a practice of working with scientists on topics such as heart transplants, brain implants, neurology, and immunology. These video-projection pieces take as long as six months to a year to be ready for exhibition. As in such works as Atlas: There and Here (2012) currently touring in the exhibition, Brains(s) in Spain, or Blue Matter (2020), shown recently at the Kunsthal Charlotteborg, Copenhagen.
To counter this he has developed a parallel approach, producing small 'quicker to realise' watercolours, making them at a rate of 4 or 5 a week. This he does alongside creating the larger-scale video pieces to make something material and get him through, what can be, very monotonous periods of editing on the computer.
The watercolours have become more and more important to him, spreading and growing in a variety of ways as an art practice should. They now inform many parts of his practice, which as well as the video installations include oil paintings, sculptures and artist's books.
The watercolours first originated as he tried to make a 'messier' work, to reflect the complicated aspects of a project on heart transplant; Hybrid Bodies (2008-2019), a project based in Toronto, Canada, where most of the work he made were video pieces, too clean for a project that was very much about 'messy entanglements', the world of donors and donor families, recipients and their tricky relationships; the blood and guts of splicing bodies together. He started painting realistic hearts in watercolour in a human dissecting space in Antwerp, but gradually these have moved on to become extended paintings, semi-biographical heads or universal states of mind, painted in his studio in Winchester.
The watercolours have also spread to take on aspects of video-based works that have included MRI cross sections of the brain, to stitch and felting aspects of earlier projects (Junctures of a Haphazard Kind, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas 2021), that tried to explore aspects of grafting bodies by replicating this through the action of inviting other artists to join together sections of Andrew's watercolours. In Change my Mind (Science Gallery, Bengaluru, 2022), which looked at the possibility of brain implants, artists, scientists and the public 'added' to head images developed by Andrew.
All these projects can be seen to have informed his recent work.
For press, images and any media requests:
Contact: Rob Kesseler
07931 541 417
[email protected]
Someone I Know press release
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