KARLA BLACK: SUGARPLUM DREAMS & CELLOPHANE NIGHTMARES

Karla Black’s sculptures are all sugarplum candy dreams and cellophane suffocation nightmares, children’s and parents’, respectively. Fragile, vast, and impossible, the very word 'sculpture' seems too solid. Crumpled clouds sag from the ceiling and particulate matter diffuses across the floor—pastel lunar landscapes made from makeup and bath bombs and soap and chalk. Her works permeate the senses, while also threatening to evanesce before the eyes. Art historian Briony Fer contends that her "[s]culpture…dissolves structure through…transparency and pulverization" (1). Sometimes they seem in domestic disrepair, like a sloppy, disintegrating vintage bathroom, outfitted with a powder blue tub and a clear vinyl shower curtain. Visceral, tactile, and sensual, Black's sculptures are also environments: a playground for children with sweet talcummed bums and too-adult makeup, or a parlor for fashionable Victorians with powdered wigs over dirty hair and syphilis scars.

1 Briony Fer, “Karla Black’s abstraction,” Karla Black: Scotland + Venice. Exh. cat. (Glasgow: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2011; published on the occasion of the artist’s solo presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale), n.p.

excerpt from retired blog Rogue Rave