For more information please visit Lisa Sette Gallery.

By Allison Arieff

Fragments of Carrie Marill’s fantastical Visual Aides series are as surprising to the eye

as Obama’s uttering of “clean coal technology” is to the ear. What at first seems a

bucolic glimpse into agrarian idyll reveals itself to be a mind-boggling mash-up: equal

parts pre-industrial arcadia and post-apocalyptic terrain.

Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible sounds like an awesome Tony Robbins

affirmation: in visual form, this work by Marill seems to me a perfect illustration of our

present-day realities (not to mention a spot-on assessment of the current political

climate). The pioneer-era obsessions of America’s recession-weary urbanites—

heirloom livestock, recycling, alternative energy and water conservation—co-exist

tenuously with other, less-eco pursuits like pampered pets, exotic birds, and um,

nuclear power. This motley assortment of quotidian elements seems to co-exist in a

waiting for the other shoe to drop sort of way. Are those dark clouds encroaching or

receding?

To Read More …. Allison Arieff’s essay

I have a continual struggle to maintain a vegetarian diet. Bottom line, I like meat but I don’t agree with how the animals are treated in factory farms.  My way of boycotting this behavior is by abstaining from factory raised meat. The good stuff is out there, the animals which are treated with respect and not pumped with hormones, but they are hard to find and expensive. My exposure to documentaries, books and articles on the meat industry leaves me feeling heartbroken for the lack of respect these animals are given during most of their lifetime. I am not opposed to eating meat, I crave protein and have a hard time satiating that craving with a vegetarian diet. This body of work is a way for me to face these animals and see if once again I can convince myself that their unhappiness is not worth my craving for meat.

The Persian Miniatures have intense color, minute attention to detail, and a corralling of nature, all of which are enhanced by the limitation of a single viewer, a seemingly controlled experience. On the other hand, the Japanese Scroll Paintings are inherently expansive in their reach. Their focus on nature is much more expansive and unbridled.  There are vast panoramic scenes that are aided by the genre’s composition and can be viewed by many at a time.

My challenge in these works was to combine both expansiveness and inclusiveness into one painting, whilst using the similarities of pattern and the lovely use of gold as a foundation for my process.

For more information please visit Lisa Sette Gallery.

In 2006 I was traveling thru France and found brilliantly colored printed “visual aides” at a flea market. Originally these visual aides were didactic drawings used in classrooms in the late 1950’s to illustrate for children different aspects of the world (farming, industry, water tables the seashore, etc). I scanned, archived and reproduced these images on watercolor paper and updated them with specific current events which relate to the state of our environment and how humans anthropomorphize the planet. The chosen events were applied to the drawings in a similar style as the originals so the completed image becomes a “Where’s Waldo” of what’s evolved and devolved environmentally and socially since the 1950’s.  Collectively the works introduce contemporary issues and ideals into a 1950’s world view creating a sometimes satirical, but persistently critical look into to our collective past and future.

For more information please contact Jen Bekman Gallery

2 prints from this series are available at 20×200.com

Jen Bekman is one of the pioneer galleries in Nolita. This show of Carrie Marill’s work is a study in the deconstruction of the landscape/still life. Her delicately rendered pieces lie somewhere in between, and it’s good to know someone is still expending a lot of time and thought pondering the value of genre painting while doing something quietly innovative

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Charles Dee Mitchell

You wouldn’t expect an artist in the year 2008 to wake in the morning and say to himself or herself, “Today I am going to make a painting of a bird.” Aren’t they supposed to be hacking into computer code or working out the logistics of 15-channel video presentations?

But Carrie Marill goes to her studio every day and paints birds, and, judging from her exhibition at Conduit Gallery, it is something she does very well.

She works in gouache on uniformly sized sheets of 12-by-9-inch paper, placing either the entire animal or its most telling features on a background she leaves largely white. Ms. Marill, although she is scrupulously faithful to the details of the birds she depicts, is no Audubon. She doesn’t offer a great deal of environment in her gouaches, and the few tree limbs that appear are there for compositional effect rather than environmental information.

Ms. Marill painted these birds while at an artists residency in Steamboat Springs, Colo., so she had considerably more species to choose from than the grackles and sparrows that populate my yard in Dallas. And she presents the birds as portraits, but without turning them into human caricatures.

Her solemn Turkey Vulture is shown in profile, resigned to the grim duty of feeding off carrion. The slender, arching neck of an American White-Necked Pelican is almost invisible against the white paper, whereas her Magpie stares belligerently at the viewer. The work can also be humorous while staying true to the nature of her subjects. The Female of a Red Wing Blackbird, which incidentally turns out to be a small brown bird, is comically spread-eagled between two tiny twigs.

This is technically sophisticated and witty work and one of those small pleasures we look for in the summer heat

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Whimsical, stark, spare, disarming, sneakily and subversively weighty, Carrie Marill’s works in gouache and acrylic combine the silliness of Dr. Seuss with the sober precision of John James Audubon. Born in San Francisco in 1976 to a dentist father and a phlebotomist mother, Marill and her brother (now a musician) benefited from a rather typically unrestricted Bay Area childhood.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2002 from San Francisco State University, Marill left the familiarity of California for a master’s program and some hoped-for structure at upstate New York’s Cornell University. “I wanted a rigorous critique,” recalls Marill. “Instead, they let us do whatever we wanted. We were left alone a lot, which was actually good. Later on, I appreciated it.” The school also emphasized a more intellectual approach, which Marill eventually warmed to as well. “I was very visceral going in, and very conceptual when I came out,” says Marill, who spends lots of time in libraries and online poring through Google’s Images. “I’ve now melded those two together in my work.”

Now based in Goodyear, AZ, right outside Phoenix, and living with her farmer husband Matthew Moore, Marill has applied her collagist touch to everything from birds and plants to trucks and imaginary buildings. “I like people to get a reaction to the beauty and fragility of life,” says Marill. She is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX; Sixspace, Culver City, CA.