Artists & Works

STYLE: 70S PHOTOGRAPHY

Born in New York, Ellen Carey studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the University at Buffalo. Her hand-manipulated photographs were first exhibited during her studies in Buffalo in the late seventies. Since then, Carey has had many one-person exhibitions throughout the United States, and her work is in major museum collections internationally. Carey is one of the artists who were involved in the founding of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, which became the launching point for many postmodern artists in the late seventies and eighties.

Carey says that her approach to photography is as a “picture maker, not picture taker.” She is interested in exploring the possibilities of abstraction in photography, and from her early works, where she combined gestural painting with photography of recognizable subjects, she has progressed to creating wholly abstract photographs with a large-format Polaroid camera, “drawings” made of light. Carey’s affinities lie more with abstract painting of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as this untitled work from the earliest stage in her career demonstrates.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

G. Roger Denson, Forms, Figures, Expressions, 1981, Albright/CEPA/Hallwalls catalog
"The processes of photography and painting serve as Carey’s primary concern, with the figure/ground relationship only secondary. This particular insight into Carey’s priorities enables one to make sense of her ability to fuse both a classicist's distance and an expressionist's ambitious dynamic onto one body of work...Carey's models demonstrate such order by their very idealization. Their grace, poise and particularly, their relationship with the pictorial plane all give evidence to the deliberate and calculating order of Carey's aesthetics...The tonal boundaries of Carey’s photography are also extended by additions of white paint, airbrush sprays and dark inks. Carey claims that particularly by adding white, 'a luminosity appears at once celestial, referring to a stellar quality and at the same time imitates the reversal of light found in photographic negatives. Thus the effects of white paint on a dark background add dimension...'...Carey chooses rather to employ the aesthetic strategy of the Pop artists of the 1960s and subsequent Minimalists. Her work is devoid of any psychological revelation, which is not to belittle her. Carey is far more interested in exploring her own inner need to trace what have been considered by aestheticians since Plato to be the idyllic dimensions and proportions of a subject...she remains a classicist."
Carey quote (same source as above):"...in a sense, when one looks at my images they are in effect seeing a double portrait: the external self (photograph) and the internal self (marks)."

Ellen Carey artist statement, www.ellencarey.com
"Abstraction is well-established in painting, but still emergent in photography, as is suggested by the Abstract Urge and Content and Discontent exhibitions, both curated by photography critic Andy Grunberg and both including my work. In my particular case, abstraction has in the last few years approached more and more closely towards Minimalism, as my most recent one-person show in New York bears out. The reason is that I wish to push the parameters of the photographic medium, both to question the process by which a photograph is made and raise the issue of photographic meaning in the absence from the frame of a recognizable representation."