Description of Caroline Kent’s Work-Lisa
When I entered the Nash Gallery, the first thing I saw was a series of paintings by Caroline Kent. I was as intrigued by their unusual shapes and their titles as I was by the painting itself. A painting called “I Saw the Sound of the Romanian Language” and a series of drawings in the next room (which seemed to be a meditation on Romania and its language) clued me in that Kent’s relationship with Romania must be the driving force behind her work, though I’m not sure what the nature of that relationship is.
There are clear similarities between her paintings; all of them have a sculptural quality, all have narrow cutouts or “spaces”, and all have similar color schemes and patterns. The repetition of these shapes all over the gallery gives the impression that this is an obsession of Kent’s, an idea that she has to work out through many, many different pieces. Through different media too, since she displays paper cutouts and drawings alongside her paintings as well. I could see how long she had been working with this one idea, or this one place, and I could see how important it is to her. There’s a very intimate quality about the exhibition of this obsession of hers, like she is inviting everyone into her struggle with expressing this idea. One of the pieces that immediately gave me the feeling of being invited in is “I Carved a Space for You,” which is an almost-rectangular piece with two thin lines cut out of it. When I got to this piece, I was thinking, She carved a space for me. That is sweet. But could I fit in there?
This brought up a problem in my mind, thinking about the smallness of the spaces she had created in her work and what that meant. “I Carved a Space for You” was friendly and inviting on one level, but exclusive on another. Thinking in terms of Kent’s experiences in Romania, it seemed to me that the size of these spaces might indicate the extent of her own willingness to yield to another culture, or perhaps America’s willingness (or unwillingness) to create spaces for other cultures within its own. I also started to think about the “spaces” Kent had created as “gaps”––gaps between cultures or between languages––that people need to get around or across in order to build new relationships. One piece, called (I think) “Look to the Rock From Which You Were Hewn” made me think also that Kent’s work might represent her own roots and the spaces in her life where she had been cut off from them.
Language is clearly an important aspect of her work as well. In her series of drawings, it looks as though a child wrote over them with Romanian words or letters. Her paintings almost seem like letters themselves, and the graffiti-like patterns on them have that quality too. These shapes get repeated in different contexts, signifying different things, like words and letters do. It’s as if she has created this metalanguage through her art to talk about the Romanian language and culture, and I think that is the impression you get when you walk into the gallery. That she’s had to develop this alternate language where she can express these complicated ideas, and that the viewer has to go in and figure it out and somehow bridge the gaps she has created between our language and hers.