Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) recontextualizes images to confront and reframe history as a battle for land and the ways it is imagined. Her paintings and prints reproduce seemingly disparate images, objects, and textual references across recurring horizons and shorelines. Her referents meander through these visual territories as roving characters inquiring into the tension between forced colonial absence and the deeply etched presence of a land base.
In densely layered prints, such as Exit (2018) and Anti-Retro (2018) pictured above, visual referents move across these turbulent landscapes. Diverse images—including mica hand and talon forms disinterred from ancient Woodland earthworks; horses and cowboys; masks from the 1962 exploitive documentary film, Mondo Cane; shells such as miigis; bent land-marker trees; and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project—fill these prints to draw attention to histories of erasure and dispossession. Many of the objects and references evoke the movements of stories and migrations across ancestral territories; others recall the violence against Indigenous communities inherent in Western films, as in Anti-Retro, or the destruction to Indigenous monuments and earthworks through the construction of highways like I-94, as in Exit. Throughout, Carlson examines the settler impulse to erase past histories in order to make long-inhabited land appear otherwise unoccupied when taken over, redeveloped, and consumed.
Carlson’s works are frequently organized around a consistent horizon line. Some of these landscapes are based on the Lake Superior shoreline and her home in northern Minnesota, Gichi Bitobig, or “Great Double Bay,” in Ojibwemowin, also known as Grand Marais. Other landscapes are imaginary. Her play of shifting, layered imagery unfolds to the viewer over time. She builds her compositions gradually through multiple layers, evoking temporal and geological strata. “Land changes, it has to change,” Carlson declares, and her prints contain not only symmetries but also resplendent variety, shifting “like the wake behind a boat or waves on a lake.” 1 The prints organize space but also break up static and stereotypical depictions of land, peoples, and cultures. The shining mica hands in Exit, for example, printed with a pigment that contains mica silicate dust, are held up as if to indicate “STOP.” Pictorially, they interrupt the linear recession into the horizon line and deny the viewer easy entry into the visual space, suggesting these layered landscapes require permission, or at least contemplation, to access.
For Carlson, printmaking is a medium that can be responsive to the fear of the loss of land, life, and livelihood that undergirds Indigenous communities. In their seriality and multiplicity, prints are resilient to loss and counteract historic attempts at dispossession and erasure. 2 As she recently described for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “I use the iteration to give it some movement, to give it a multiple existence in the same space. You can't hold it all in your head at the same time. You are forced to make decisions with what you are looking at in a way where you are not able to possess it all at once.” 3 Her landscapes are thus what scholar Kate Morris describes as “anti-invitational”—layered with imagery that is neither easily digestible nor accessible to occupation by the viewer. 4 Indeed, not only do the prints unfold over time, but Carlson sometimes embeds private communal meanings within her work, intended only for insiders.
In her new print Rolling Head (2025), Carlson references a figure common to Woodlands and Plains narratives, a woman from the early history of the world known as “Rolling Head,” who was one of the first victims of domestic violence on Turtle Island. After being discovered committing infidelities with a snake or, in the Ojibwe version of the story that Carlson knows, a woodpecker, the woman is decapitated by her husband. Her head continues to roll through the world, chasing her children, either to be with them in an act of endless love or, in some tellings, out of a cannibalistic hunger to consume them.
Two headless female forms fill the center of the print in front of turbulent lake waters: the Niké of Samothrace and the blue imprint of a woman’s nude body from Yves Klein’s Anthropométries series (1960), a “living paintbrush.” The bodies frame the name “ROLLING HEAD” and the words “Orion just outside my window” at the center of the print. The textual reference to the Orion constellation, named another mythical perpetrator of sexual violence against women nonetheless heroized in the stars, notes that even the sky is full of imagined misogynists. 5 Carlson thus deploys varied imagery to show that the origins of such narratives of violence against women can be located anywhere, even as they follow Indigenous communities into the present. Yet two woodpeckers also fly forth from the bodies as if emerging from their necks. Ecologically, woodpeckers are known as healers for their ability to quickly and efficiently clear invasive insects from stands of trees. Here, their wings echo those of Niké and the out-flung arms of the headless blue Anthropométrie, suggesting the possibility of freedom or an escape from such cycles of violence.
In prints like Rolling Head, Carlson is thus engaged in a form of storytelling that takes place across narrative and temporal space, moving through cultural referents to find a shared language. Her approach to visual space and itinerant art historical motifs match pictorial and narrative movement. As Vizenor notes, “Carlson creates great layers of conceptual scenes, silhouettes of cultural absence and presence, and converted landscapes of time, space, and course of memories.” 6 Images are redeployed to new memorial functions as their place in such narratives shift conceptual positions. Thus, the shifting nature of Carlson’s visual treatment of images and their layers are, as she describes, "alive and ever-changing or ever shimmering.”7
–Excerpt from Christopher T. Green, “Woodland Native Art in Transmotion,” in The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion, Christopher T. Green, ed., exhibition catalog produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name on view September 12 – October 29, 2024 at The List Gallery at Swarthmore College. Courtesy of the author. An early trial proof of Rolling Head was on display in this exhibition.
Christopher T. Green is a writer and scholar whose research, curating, and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art, Native North American art and material culture, and the interrelation of Indigeneity, primitivism, and Euro-American art within global histories of modernism. He recently curated “Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, April 13-September 30 2024) and “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” (List Gallery, Swarthmore College, September 12-October 29 2024). He received his PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College.
Rolling Head
Andrea Carlson, 2025
22-run screenprint on Coventry Rag paper
Edition of 20
36 ¼ x 48 ½ in.
Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org
Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) is a visual artist working in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The British Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada.
Carlson has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including those awarded by the Carolyn Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the United States Artists Fellowship, and the McKnight Foundation. Carlson has exhibited in Canada and has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, La Centrale at the Powerhouse (Montreal, QC), and the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), among others. In addition to the many reviews and articles on her work, Carlson has worked as a writer and curator, and is an accomplished lecturer.
For availability and to purchase Rolling Head, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org