CHICAGO, IL.- The MCA announced Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Chicago. This exhibition is part of Chicago Works, an exhibition series at the MCA that features artists shaping the contemporary art scene in the city and beyond. Opening on August 3, 2024, and running through February 2, 2025, Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons is presented in the MCA’s fourth floor Turner Gallery.
Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Ojibwe/European descent; based in northern Minnesota and Chicago, IL) considers how landscapes are shaped by history, relationships, and power. Her artworks imagine places that are “everywhere and nowhere,” visualizing these shifting yet ever-present dynamics. Grounded in Anishinaabe understandings of space and time, the works in this exhibition reflect on how land holds memories of colonial expansion and violence as well as Indigenous presence and resistance.
Across painting, video, and sculpture, Carlson organizes imagined landscapes around one constant: the horizon. This line is reminiscent of her homelands on Lake Superior. It is also a significant art historical trope that artists have employed to depict territories as vast and vacant, ripe for the taking. Carlson’s prismatic works are not empty: they are densely layered with an abundance of motifs, making reference to the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Confronting histories of erasure and dispossession, Carlson proposes that what appears to be lost can be remade, reimagined, or otherwise regained.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the artist is adapting her print Exit (2019) into the form of multiple billboards. Exit features the earthwork known as Man Mound, which is one of thousands of Indigenous structures and burial sites that have been fractured, flattened, or otherwise destroyed by highways crossing through the Midwest and beyond. Originally conceived of as “a sigil for those who travel on I-94,” Exit will be realized as a billboard at multiple sites on the roads between Chicago and Minneapolis—including near Man Mound—so it can be observed by travelers on the same infrastructure that continues to cut across the landscape, including these mounds.
This exhibition is curated by Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.
Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Ojibwe/European descent; based in northern Minnesota and Chicago, IL) is an artist based in northern Minnesota and Chicago. Carlson’s work includes multimedia artworks, works on paper, and public art projects, including a billboard project at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2021. Recently, Carlson participated in the Toronto Biennial, completed a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center, and was selected as part of Prospect.6, an upcoming triennial organized by Prospect New Orleans. Carlson received a 2021 Chicago Artadia Award, a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, and a 2024 Creative Capital Award. The artist’s writing has appeared in books such as Indigenous Futurisms (IAIA Museum of Contemporary Indian Arts, 2020) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023), as well as in online publications such as e-flux Architecture.
Carlson is a co-founder of the Center for Native Futures, an art space dedicated to the work of Native artists in Chicago.
