Western Project / Carole Caroompas

Biography / Press

2007 Press Release:

CAROLE CAROOMPAS
Dancing With Misfits: Eye-Dazzler
New Paintings and Drawings
November 3 – December 22, 2007

Western Project is proud to present new work by Los Angeles legend Carole Caroompas. Three years in the making, this new body of work addresses the taming of the West in the 20th century. Caroompas uses fragments from John Huston’s, The Misfits, Brian DePalma’s, Carrie, and a cosmology of Pop-culture images, layered within patterns from Navajo Eye-Dazzler rugs. It is the cosmic dance of good and evil, the desire for home and relationship, and the struggle for control and power in a convoluted universe with characters such as Carrie and Karen Carpenter or Clark Gable and Arthur Lee. Each plays a role in the Grand Scheme; each an actor, equally mythic – in art, as in contemporary life. Caroompas’ paintings explore the tragic and violent legacies of American history in the West as they echo the hope of a promised land. Her non-narrative works resonate like acid-fueled poems to nature and culture, honoring the lineage of artists such as Frida Kahlo, Walt Whitman and William Burroughs.

Carole Caroompas has exhibited widely in the US including the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. She has also been the recipient of numerous artist grants such as, National Endowment for the Arts (twice), The Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

A full-color catalogue of the exhibition is available, with texts by Anthony Ausgang, Don Bachardy, Alexis Smith, Mike Kelley, Sandeep Mukherjee, Tom Knechtel, Roy Dowell, Karen Carson, Sandow Birk, Paul McCarthy, Thomas Woodruff and Cliff Benjamin.