Carrie Marill - Sculptural Paintings

Throughout her career Carrie Marill has worked with paint media on paper with precise detailed imagery that distill a wide range of topics related to modern life both universal and personal. Bodies of work have included; animal and land conservation, String Theory, items in the auctioned off estate of the Duke of Windsor, Persian miniatures and modern art history. With her new sculptural paintings, Marill continues to engage art history, beginning with Jean Arp’s three-dimensional wooden wall hangings, while also attempting to square the divergent approaches to artmaking so often at odds with each other; Technology and the Handmade. For Marill, technology and the handmade are; “constantly vying for attention not only in my studio, but also in the world at large. On one hand, I struggle with technology and its lack of the “hand,” but I now depend so much on the technology to realize my work. Can I make the machine-made appear hand-hewn? Can I make the hand-made more polished?”

The works in Sculptural Paintings is a response to the challenge of integrating the hand of the artist into technology and pushing the boundaries of painting by representing it in a sculptural form. Each construction begins as a drawing by the artist who then worked with an architect to translate the rendering into the 3D computer program Rhino. The digital files were then used to mill the form from MDF with a CNC Routing Machine before being sanded and painted by Marill.

Within the titles to each work, Marill hints at her formal and personal inspirations, e.g. Riley-Sol, the love child of British Op-Art painter Bridget Riley and American Minimalist Sol LeWitt in sculptural form; its black and white stripes allude to the work of both artists.

Carrie Marill was born in San Francisco, CA 1976. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 2002 with a BA in Painting and received an MFA in Painting from Cornell University in 2004. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States in California, New York, Seattle, Miami, Dallas, and Arizona. Marill’s work has been published in New American Paintings, Wired Magazine, Southwest Art, The New Times, The Wall Street Journal, Modern Painters, LA weekly and the LA Times. In addition to continual exhibitions, Marill’s practice includes developing large scale outdoor murals, and helping to run Combine Studios, a residency program for international artists in downtown Phoenix.