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
Highpoint Editions is pleased to release Rolling Head, a new screenprint by Minnesota-based artist Andrea Carlson. This 22-run screenprint is Carlson’s third print with Highpoint Editions and touches on stories of misogyny and its pervasiveness within indigenous narratives, art history, and mythology.
About Rolling Head
Andrea Carlson unmoors images to confront and reframe history as a battle for land and the ways it is imagined. In her densely layered prints, visual referents move across turbulent landscapes organized by the consistent horizon line of Lake Superior. Imagery, including mica hand and talon forms from ancient Woodland earthworks, horses and cowboys, masks from the 1962 film Mondo Cane, bent land marker trees, Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project, and more fills these prints to draw attention to histories of erasure and dispossession.
Andrea Carlson’s other prints with Highpoint Editions - Anti-Retro (2018) and Exit (2019)
Her new print, Rolling Head, references a common figure in Woodlands and Plains narratives, “Rolling Head,” said to be the roving head of a woman decapitated by her husband for infidelity in one of the first acts of domestic violence on Turtle Island. Her head continues to roll through the world, chasing her children, either out of a cannibalistic hunger to consume them or, in some tellings, to be with them in an act of endless love. Carlson places two headless female forms—the Niké of Samothrace and the blue imprint of a woman’s nude body from Yves Klein’s Anthropométries series (1960)—in front of a roiling lake waters, and two woodpeckers, the bird that in the version of the story recounted to Carlson was the adulterous partner of Rolling Head, fly forth as if emerging from their necks. The textual reference to Orion at the center of the print, another mythical perpetrator of sexual violence against women nonetheless heroized in the stars, notes that even the sky is full of imagined misogynists and that the origins of such narratives of violence against women can be located anywhere, even as they endlessly follow Indigenous communities into the present.
–Statement by Christopher T. Green, adapted from the exhibition “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” on view September 12 – October 29, 2024, The List Gallery at Swarthmore College. An early trial proof of Rolling Head was on display in the exhibition. Read the larger statement from Christopher T. Green here.
Andrea Carlson painting a film over a test print.
Since her first print with Highpoint Editions in 2018, Andrea Carlson has taken to the process of screenprinting naturally. The artist hand-painted each large film separation prior to handing them off to the printers to expose onto screens and painstakingly chose each color to infuse the composition with energetic tension and brilliant intensity. Carlson and the Highpoint Editions team evaluated each layer’s color to ensure the finished print communicated her vision as she intended.
Like her paintings, Carlson’s prints are densely layered with reference and pattern –commenting on the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Rolling Head creates a whirlpool of dialogue amongst vivid hues and stunning line-work.
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