This week we welcome Carla Lobmier. Lobmier has lived and worked in Jackson Heights, Queens since 2000. She received BFA degrees (Painting/Art History) from Eastern Illinois University and her MFA (Painting/Drawing) from University of Illinois. In 1999, she was awarded an APEX ART residency and moved to New York City. Solo exhibitions include “Love Letter (to Light),” Memphis, TN, “Dirt, rock and far views,” Langston Hughes Center, Not so fast, Resobox Gallery and site-specific installations, “Scrolling Confluence” and “Supernova”, Mid-Manhattan Library. Ragged Sky Press published, “Grace In Dwelling,” on the occasion of this piece exhibited at the Queens Museum in 2017-18. Her 2018 art/movement project, “Shaping the Container,” was supported with a New Works Grant by the Queens Council for the Arts.
“My painting is a critique of art lacking in visual mystery and expansiveness. Metaphor invites viewers private contemplation and drift. I hope to slow down the noise and create a paradoxical visual and intellectual space that privileges thinking and imagination. The beauty of metaphor in tandem with questions in an open-ended picture is a thread in the history of art that I want to catch hold of. In counterpart, the art should reflect its time.
Recently, inside/outside has grown with content-sourcing outside myself. I am interested in how we connect as a community and how art might shape and improve the way we do so. ‘Wait Around’ is a new series of six paintings made at the crest of the pandemic from March through July 2020. This work is both a waking dream reaction and a punch to the heart witnessing time’s movement.”