ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings explore how movement, memory, and changing conditions accumulate on a surface. I have long been interested in the way paint can behave like natural forces—flowing, pooling, spreading, and breaking apart. Weather, water systems, geological strata, and topographic maps inform the work. Living and working in the Hudson Valley has sharpened my attention to these sources, from the crooked structure of branches to the way a storm transforms familiar ground.
In Surface Memory, I build paintings through pouring, transfer, layering, scraping, veiling, drawing, abrasion, and selective repainting. My background in printmaking informs my use of pressure, reversal, and the movement of pigment between surfaces. I revise what fluid paint produces, choosing what to preserve, interrupt, cover, or recover. Earlier and later states remain visible together, making time a physical condition of the surface.
Through these revisions, I develop a tension between abstraction and partial recognition. A contour can suggest something bodily or botanical; a passage can recall terrain or an atmospheric mass. I work to keep those associations open while giving each painting a deliberate structure. I want the surfaces to reveal themselves slowly, allowing a viewer’s first reading to change with sustained looking.
BIO
Carolanna Parlato has exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States since the 1990s. Her solo exhibitions include Morgan Lehman Gallery, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, The Phatory, and the Islip Art Museum. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, The Drawing Center, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Garvey|Simon, Art Cake, G2 Gallery in Santa Fe, and Galerie JoLi in the Netherlands.
Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Art in America,The Boston Globe, ARTnews, artcritical, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, The New Criterion, and Whitehot Magazine.
Her paintings and works on paper are held in public, corporate, and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State, ArtBank in Washington, DC, NewYork-Presbyterian, the Francis Greenburger Collection, Public Art for Public Schools, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, and the Islip Art Museum. Her large-scale commissions and architectural projects include Peachtree Center in Atlanta, Current for Arts Brookfield at One New York Plaza, and Steller’s Jay for Morgan Stanley at One Post Office Square in Boston.
Parlato received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied printmaking. She divides her time between Brooklyn and Kinderhook, New York.