Shimmer on the Horizon: Landscapes Reimagined

MCAD Alumni Andrea Carlson ’05 debuted her exhibition Shimmer on Horizons last August at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The works featured are large-scale panorama landscapes built up of smaller panels to create a disorienting but engaging and dynamic viewing experience. As an Objibwe artist who’s descended from Grand Portage Band in Northern Minnesota, she strives to create a narrative in her landscapes of nature defending itself.

“Some of those landscapes are imagined and temporary. Others you have to kind of work for as a viewer of the work,” Carlson explains in her short documentary created for the exhibition. “I’ll sometimes stack landscapes through that iteration. It’s suggesting of time… There’s these buried histories or buried stories that are still with us. They’re still right below our feet… We’re adding layers to it.”

These layers go far beyond just the sheer amount of visual information and symbolism in these pieces. During the COVID pandemic, she’d started including and immortalizing the names of loved ones she’d lost in her paintings. In a conversation with Jeremy Lybager for Art in America, she states “Images survive us. They sometimes get past us. They also get destroyed… We don’t get to necessarily select the winners and losers. Who gets to decide who becomes a fossil?”

Shimmer on Horizons
Turner Gallery (Chicago, IL)
August 4, 2024–February 2, 2025

Learn More

• Andrea Carlson’s Landscapes Frenetic Landscapes
  (artnews.com — January 6, 2025)
• Shimmer on Horizons
  (mcachicago.org)