She earned a BA in studio arts and American Indian studies (language emphasis route) from the University of Minnesota in 2003.
She frequently works on a wide scale, combining hyper-realistic photographs with indeterminate space or graphic patterning to produce a world that is both familiar and foreign.
"[10] Carlson's work and writing challenges museums to evolve beyond long-standing Western institutional paradigms, and to grapple with their colonial past.
Using various media on paper to create objects from museum collections that float over pop-art influenced ranges, while Carlson's own heritage is hinted at in the background.
She purposefully arranges the small images into rows and columns to form the pyramid and heavily layers them, adding more meaning to her message on western culture and assimilation.
[16] She further creates this illusion of a pyramid by drawing an empty and dull setting for the background of the rest of her piece that contrasts against the heavy imagery she paints.
She stated that these fictional ideas of who they should be makes it so, “[a]ny changes to that code render them ‘unauthentic’ and cultures are institutionally killed.”[18] For example, in her print Exit (2019, screenprint) Carlson has stated that the piece comments on a “deep-seated fear of losing cultural practices, languages and art forms,” as represented by the exit sign.
[19] Carlson has long drawn visual influence from film and movie culture, and in some of her works, she plays with cinematic conventions, asks the audience to act as the viewfinder, and encourages viewers to reconsider what they're seeing and how they're seeing it.