Mary Ellen Carroll
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Mary Ellen Carroll is a conceptual artist that lives and works in New York City. Carroll’s art is infused with a wry sense of humor. Moving deftly among large-scale architectural interventions, experimental film, staged events, sculpture, photography, and book projects, her work interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, language, and power. The notion of representation and identification has always been at the core of Carroll’s oeuvre, and her dedication to a political and social critique that is consciously developed without a signature style. The unifying conceptual premise is self-consciousness or physical mirroring and the copy.
Carroll is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a "Pollack/Krasner Award," a "Guggenheim Fellowship," a "Rockefeller Fellow" and a "MacDowell Colony Fellow." In 2006, she was nominated and awarded a grant from the Pennies From Heaven Fund, which is a part of the New York Community Trust, for her contribution to New York City as a visual artist for work that is advanced, experimental, and ‘socially’ visionary.
The work that Carroll realizes ranges from the material to the immaterial and this can be in the physical sense as well as the temporal:
For a commission at Art Omi, the sculpture park in upstate New York, Carroll had a stolen, red American sedan from the mid-eighties dropped into the middle of a wooded section of the park so that it would look as if it had always been there, because what is more familiar than seeing an abandoned car in upstate New York. The piece functioned on three levels: the performance/process of placing the vehicle; the ‘sculpture’ as the piece is encountered in the woods; and a triptych of photographs that was taken that were modeled on the Hudson River School painter Fredric Church.
In the spring of 2007, Carroll was invited to participate in an exhibition/presentation at the Foundation Telefonica and the first international residency for artists in Argentina. For this project, title Nothing, Carroll went to spend five weeks in Argentina with only her passport --- no money, no credit cards --- only the clothing on her back from the moment she walked out the front door of her apartment in New York City. She documented everything through writing with paper and pen that was stolen from the business center at the President’s Club at Newark Airport.
With support from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2003 and 2004, Carroll realized the acclaimed 24 hour, two theater movie Federal. Federal is the articulation of an image of what is presently legally, socially and politically non-representable post the World Trade Towers. The viewer is given a chance to watch the movie from either of the two halves gives the appearance of a freedom of choice, yet in the end mirrors the same set of restrictions that go unnoticed in the public domain. In effect, the audience is watching the watchers.
Last Fall, Carroll taught a graduate architecture studio with the architect Charles Renfro at Rice University and is also working on the project OFPC 1999-2007, an aggregate land art piece that will be physically realized in Houston, Texas in the fall of 2007. This will transform a residence into a sustainable and habitable structure after the structure and the land are rotated 180 degrees.
In addition to a number articles and publications on her work, a monograph will be published in 2007 by Steidl/Mack that will be designed by the Amand Mevis, Linda Van Duersen and Danielle Aubert. Her work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions around the world including the Whitney Museum, ICA London, Museum fur Volkerkunde in Munich, ICA Philadelphia, MOMUK in Vienna and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, and it resides in numerous public and private collections.
