Ellen Carey
[4][5][6] Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as "inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work" and her photograms as "performative sculptures enacted in the gestational space of the darkroom," whose pure hues, shadows and color shifts deliver "optical buzz and conceptual bang.
[3] It included artists Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Charles Clough and spawned the alternative spaces Hallwalls and Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA), each of which held exhibitions of her early painted self-portraits.
[40][41][42] She has experimented with the medium's chemical, light-related, color and material properties, often rejecting its documentary dimension and hierarchical relations of subject and object in favor of possibilities residing between painting and sculpture, realized through the manipulation of process and printing.
In a review of Carey's 1987 survey at ICP, Art in America critic Stephen Westfall described her self-portraits and portraits as "vastly underrated" work that proposed a merging of human form with metaphysical energies, made visible on the photographs through painted marks, light pens, and superimposed psychedelic and geometric patterns.
[4][46] Her early works were black-and-white, gender-specific images whose dramatic poses and lighting and expressive marks suggested emotional states of pain, vulnerability or self-assurance and organic, ritualistic scenarios.
[29][4][48] This work departed from traditional portraiture in no longer seeking to capture the character or identity of its subjects;[4][48] rather, Carey or others served as de-individualized stand-ins for the human spirit, seamlessly disappearing into and merging with Op Art and Pop patterns evoking technology, biology, consciousness, time, and perhaps artificial intelligence.
[47][33][49][44] Critics such as Barry Schwabsky suggested that the specific qualities of the patterns opened interpretive possibilities and raised notions of the self, variously, as infinitely complex, unknowable, fractured, constructed from readymade cultural forms, or spiritually seeking.
[48][29] Carey began creating cameraless photograms in 1989, which specifically explored abstraction and conceptual issues at the basis of photography, through a process embracing chance, improvisation, and risk.
[6][50][51] Photograms date back to the dawn of photography, in work by mid-19th-century artists Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot—and later, Man Ray—who placed botanical specimens, salt, silver or other objects onto light-sensitive paper to create "shadow" images.
[2][6][53] In 2000, she began producing brightly hued photograms whose series titles reflected the objects or materials she used to interrupt or strike the paper (e.g., "Push Pins", "Penlights") or referenced visual phenomena, such as afterimages ("Blinks").
[20] Carey has written about and researched art-related topics such as the history of photography (including the first women photographer, Anna Atkins), color theory, and tetrachromacy and its relation to gender.
