Places, People, and Textures

By Kylee Jennings

Bethany Carlson has been creating art ever since she was a little girl. In high school she realized she could pursue art as a career, and enrolled in Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as an undergrad. Taking two years off before going to graduate school for her masters degree at New Mexico State University, she spent her time working on paintings and doing shows around Peoria. Carlson graduated in 2011 and got a job teaching.

Carlson has mostly worked with paints, but about five years she became intrigued with textures and began working with charcoal and used a reductive process — starting with a heavy layer of charcoal and erase back to create an image.

When beginning to experiment with textures, Carlson found herself stopping frequently to take photographs of road kill to get references of fur to recreate.

Carlson’s husband is a funeral director, and they have both experienced a lot of loss in their lives. She creates sculptures and installations to give a visual representation of how people deal with death.

In her current gallery located next to Café Breve, she has an instillation of dead flowers and a ladder. She explains that the flowers are used to represent decay, just as the fur of the animal. The ladder is an ongoing experiment of using different household items in her sculptures to show how grief affects us in our everyday lives. In this particular installation, the ladder as a representation on how we need practical things to reach our goals, and ladders are used to “ascend or rise above.”

A new sort of “avenue” — as Carlson describes it — she has taken is creating paintings of a magnified image.

A painting Carlson has done is a close up of a commit that the Rosetta spacecraft landed on after 14 years of orbit.

“I find myself thinking a lot about places I can’t get to,” says Carlson in reference to the commit. This idea relates back to her other pieces as well, and how it relates to the way people think about death. “It’s hard to know where to picture someone you’ve lost… You want to believe they’re somewhere but you can’t get there.”

To the naked eye, every piece of Carlson’s work in the exhibit look to be completely unrelated. Although, to the understanding eye it can be seen that they all correlate in a way. They are all there to question and find understanding in death and life.

Check out Carlson’s exhibit this week and explore what it means to you.