Aspen Art Scene February 4, 2009
Massimiliano Gioni and Heidi Z Jacobson @ AAM.Art is everywhere. In Aspen, art is especially accessible. We take advantage of The Aspen Art Museum, it's a big-city resource in our little mountain town. We recently attended a lecture/ slide show given by super-hot curator, Massimiliano Gioni from The New Museum and The Wrong Gallery in NYC. WOW he showed off some crazy photos of his special exhibitions from around the world. Most of his stuff is wildly collaborative performance art and very grassroots. We found Gioni's rap to be fascinating.

In fact, after the lecture we sought out some of Aspen's local artists. There's plenty of accessible art right here in the valley: Each of these Aspen artists is google-able---check it out.

Artist Lets Heart Guide Color On Canvas 2/14/08
Carbondale artist Carrie Kaplan’s work is about people, in response to people, in love with people, out of love with people.

It’s at least one element — as broad as it is — that ties together her eclectic work.

“People influence me. Even if it’s somebody you meet for only five minutes, it goes into your being,” Kaplan said during an interview in her Carbondale studio.

The oil on canvas full of gray and brown hues stands out among the vibrant, colorful work that has been displayed in venues throughout Carbondale and the Valley. Yet, the people still are in there, figures she sees through her heart’s eye.

Like many of her pieces, she didn’t have a sketch or even a plan when she painted “Leaving My Chair in the City to Go Fly Fishing.” She simply woke up at eight in the morning, started painting and “it all came out,” she said.

Even as she energetically runs around the studio pulling out prints or actual paintings from her stacks, new figures and faces show up in the outlines and the blending of paint, ink and other media.

“I blob on color and I just look for the images,” she said, and later added, “It’s the little treasures that are exciting, the discovery.”

Although she likes to greet the blank canvas without a sketch, she has studied art. She has a fine arts degree from the University of Manitoba, has a background in video production and has designed furniture.

But the “textbook” method of creating is not for her.

“I paint what I am challenged to see rather than what conventionally have been programmed to see,” she states in her bio.

Kaplan’s method of painting — to let her heart and soul guide her hand and brush — along with her love of music and dance, is the way this brilliant artist has come to create.

“I’m constantly thinking in terms of motion and feel of the atmosphere,” she says. “Movements suggest tone, color, emotion, and story of choreography. This weighs heavily on my thoughts, and is being explored through painting at this moment, a choreographed piece of canvas and color.”

In describing her body of work, the self-proclaimed “idiot savant” artist says straight out: “It’s eclectic. I won’t paint your dog or a still life. It pretty much runs the gamut.”

Several of Kaplan’s paintings currently hanging at Ella restaurant in Carbondale are scenes of people enjoying food, drink, dance and the chatter of other human beings. Her work at Dos Gringos also reflects people sipping coffee and being a part of a social setting.

Other, more abstract paintings show wispy figures entwined and flowing into and out of each other, such as “I Know You Know.”

In a departure from her normal process, her “Voyage” series consists of four large paintings created a year ago when she had a “block.” It was the first times she used “sketches” in the form of collages to guide her work.

Filled with symbolism and rushing color, the collage-based paintings were actually “freeing” because, for the first time, she knew what she was going to paint, she said.

Yet not knowing what would come next has never scared her. Spiritual connections in Kaplan’s life seem to guide her toward the next step or reaffirm what she is doing.

She’ll find notes on scraps of paper that surface at just the right time, almost like a foreshadow, suggesting a path. She pointed to the back of an old receipt with a note “Aspen Youth Experience” given to her a year ago by an anonymous woman who asked if she wanted more information about the nonprofit. The girl didn’t know Kaplan or that she was an artist.

In February of this year, a representative of Aspen Youth Experience contacted Kaplan to see if she could donate some artwork for the annual celebrity silent auction. It was shortly after that meeting that the year-old note surfaced.

“The two incidents were not related,” Kaplan said.

“I try to be aware of the synchronicity and serendipity that happen to all of us daily. They’re like little signs that you’re on the right track.”

Some of her work also has hinted at events to come, but when asked if she might be psychic, she replied negatively.

“I think I have really good intuition … most of the time. I think people would say I’m psycho, not psychic.”

Either way, she has been enjoying more success as an artist lately. Aside from selling more and receiving inquiries about her work, she is planning a private art soiree this spring and has another secret (but huge) project in the works; she won’t talk about it for fear of jinxing it.

“It’s not like I had any intentions of doing any of this,” she said, adding that she is grateful for the turn in success. “It is paying off. It’s just really validating and rewarding.”

Kaplan’s paintings in Ella are for sale, and a portion of the sales will go to charity. View several pieces of her work at local restaurants Ella, Phat Thai and Dos Gringos, or visit www.myspace.com/carriekaplanstudio.
-Trina Ortega

Carrie Kaplan: Aspen spoke to this young artist, and she listened.
When Carrie Kaplan arrived in Aspen seven years ago, she was just passing through town with a friend who was moving west from South Beach. But something about this place spoke to her, and instead of continuing on with her friend, Kaplan set up camp here permanently. “It was just one of those moments when you surrender to wherever life is taking you” she says of the decision to stay. Since then, Kaplan, who was trained as a dancer before she found painting, has been making a name for herself-both locally and nationally- as an artist whose colorful, emotional pieces call to mind everyone from Ludwig to Kirchner to Matisse. She has done commissioned painting for restaurants Phat Thai and Elevation but relies primarily on commissions from individuals to keep her out of the starving-artist category. “People come to me” she says about the success of her work, and she calls her increasingly high artistic profile “a gradual process.” “When I see people connecting to my work,” she says, “it’s a total manifestation of self and spirit.”

Carrie Kaplan
If you happen to run into artist Carrie Kaplan while perusing her new exhibit, Made Me Look, at Joffrey’s in South Beach, do yourself a favor and don’t ask her to explain her artwork. Unless, of course, you want an earful of the following:

”I really hate talking about my work. It just sounds sooo pretentios,” Kaplan, 27, excitedly explains. I want people to connect with it on a visceral level. It’s all feeling. It’s a vast range of feelings and emotions. People could make their own stories up if they want to. I don’t have any pre-existing stories.”

No, but what she does have, at least at her alma mater the University of Manitoba (that’s in Canada, folks), is a reputation for boundary-pushing, sculptures, paintings, mixed media, and installation art. While a student at Manitoba, the Palm Beach County resident presented an exhibit called Beauty Marks, which featured live, overweight nude models as well as stomach churning pieces made of cow fat, human hair and chicken skin.

”I started to get recognized as the chicken lady,” Kaplan squawks.

Ask her if she received any flak from animal rights purists and Kaplan… well, you’ll see.

”It was the skin for Christ’s sake! You use bees and people would come down on you. Well, one thing that happened was we hung the chicken jacket outside on a tree with a nail. And these people came running over and claimed, ‘You’re killing the tree!’ I said, ‘You come over here and I’ll nail you to that tree.’”

When her interviewer makes the mistake of commenting that his knowledge of art is limited, Kaplan lets him have it.

”That’s so stupid! People like what they see, they don’t need to know everything. It’s like music. People just know what they like. Let’s talk about music. I’d rather talk about music than my art. Can we talk about that instead?”

No.

Made Me Look is on display through Dec. 19 at Joffrey’s, 660 Lincoln Road, South Beach.
-Jake Cline

Beauty Mark – Carrie Kaplan, April 28, Mother Tucker’s
Reviewed by Simon Hughes
Carrie Kaplan is a Winnipeg artist who has just finished her final year of study at the University of Manitoba School of Art. Not content with the piddling amount of space offered students in the school’s official year-end show, Ms. Kaplan booked herself a larger venue and opened up her full thesis year’s worth of work to the public.

In this body of work, Ms. Kaplan tackles the daunting subject of beauty, a concept which has been so twisted by the evil forces of the art and commerce as to be barely recognizable in 1996, if it ever existed at all.

Ms. Kaplan’s position on beauty is a questioning one. Cliches of burlesque sexiness are lampooned in two refief sculptures depicting martini-swilling grotesques decked out in black silk trappings thought to be so fetching to a male spectator. These humourous figures become weightier as the viewer recognizes the material out of which they are constructed – patches of chicken skin. New questions about (female) bodies as Kentucky-fried commodities are raised.

The centerpiece of the show was a fashion runway-like installation. Three stacked video monitors played footage of breast implant, face lift and other surgeries, combined with salad-tossing and chicken skin sewing. Flanking this, standing on garbage can-come-doric columns, were two live nude humans, one female and one male (the latter’s strategic placement of a shield over his sour parts made it’s own statement about beauty); they looked out over Ms. Kaplan’s disturbing clothing-sculptures.

Garmets made of human hair, poultry flesh and miscellaneous other material, were displayed in glass cases, which gave them a kind of authority, as though they were thare as a display of actual historical clothing worn by ancestors. A metal-feathered, big-breasted hair evening gown/ritual costume hung in the air. My favorite was a casual, non-spectacular jacket which, with its skin exterior and lovely hair lining seemed almost believable as part of a haute-couture collection, yet at the same time just a bit to icky.