After and Again: Michal Ann Carley and Sarah Pearce

Pearce and Carley met in 2013 and immediately bonded over the challenges of making art, balancing family life, making a living, and building a strong local art community. This month, they team up to exhibit recent work exploring themes and approaches that are important to both of them – such as the passage of time, life-cycles, and transformations of materials.

While many of Sarah Pearce’s paintings are abstract, this new body of work incorporates large life-size stencils and collage elements, using oil paint, acrylic paint, and cut paper. By using life-sized figurative stencils, Pearce introduces new formal elements that symbolize family relationships, heredity and the passage of time. 

Carley, a blacksmith, creates steel and glass sculptures in response to flora and fauna — particularly the ways the florae germinate, grow, and decline and creatures’ behavior as they court, mate, and migrate. She simplifies and abstracts her working drawings and transforms them into forged and fabricated steel. She must heat raw, industrial steel to 2000 degrees and then hammer, twist, and bend it into new forms during each 60 second period when it might still be hot enough to manipulate and then further manipulates it while cold with fabrication equipment. Carley finds the muscular resistance of the iron to adapt to gentile, curvilinear forms to be a material metaphor for the transitions and adaptations all beings must pass through when in relation — archetypally representing our human condition.

 With new sculptures by Carley in metal and glass, and mixed media paintings by Pearce, this show offers an opportunity for side-by-side conversations of form, scale, color, and texture.