Withinwithout: by Cara Tomlinson

Spring 2019

Roger W. Rogers Gallery

Cara Tomlinson’s creative work has a variety of overlapping foci, exploring construction and evolution of self, boundaries of subjectivity, and the interconnection of self and environment. One of her longest-lasting questions as an artist is how to represent the human and animal body from the perspective of being one. Where do our bodies end and begin in the mind and the environment? How do you create symbolic forms for experience as a living body interacting with other bodies? Over the years, she has arrived at an interchangeable alphabet of forms that are rearranged and juxtaposed to explore these questions. Withinwithout defines an ongoing series of paintings focused on the body as form and process, and the moveable boundaries of inside/outside, order/disorder and animal/human. In this exhibition, she specifically focuses on the processes of vision, metabolism, permeability and sedimentation.

Working with the medium of oil paint, Tomlinson conceives the act of painting as a metaphor for co-evolution of the self and environment that addresses ideas of subjectivity, agency and materiality. A painting is an object governed by a condensed historical, pictorial and material language. As she paints, she co-evolves a criteria along with the image and material. Calibrating color is a large part of her process. She works with a tonal palette that is especially sensitive to changing light conditions; her paintings are meant to be lived with and experienced through changing light. Color in painting is both material (mineral and oil) and the effect of energy. As such, it is one of the aspects of painting that carries into the environment transmitting beyond its container.