Second Thoughts

Referencing her quintessential process of layering and erasure, Baltimore-based painter Carolyn Case’s solo exhibition, Second Thoughts, alludes to the artist’s constant push to rework, re-do, and reinvent the surface of her canvases. Featuring more than a dozen paintings with such titles as Sunspot, Gingham Heart, and Drive-In Morning, Case frequently organizes her labor-intensive paintings around a simple phrase or idea. These “conceptual totems”—an object as small as a kitchen utensil or a place as theoretically expansive as her studio walls—always refer back to the larger experiences of life lived, and the many different kinds of workspaces everyday experience requires. Condensing wide-ranging visual citations into compositions that obscure precise imagery for a painterly, filmic sensibility, Case’s complex abstractions are like tightly woven tapestries, circuitous topographical maps, or large nesting dolls with many layers. In this new body of work, Case reveals her process as one of constant unpacking, where the edges of her paintings and the forms within materializes as both entrances and exits.