Mary Ellen Carroll: Mistakes and Lies II

Mary Ellen Carroll's multi-layered show titled Mistakes and Lies, part two includes photographs, video, neon sculpture, prints, and paintings.

An agent provocateur with a dissenter's viewpoint and a cynic's humor, the artist is as in sync with the information age's "bag of tricks" as she is with the role of contemporary art to subvert big media's carefully crafted spin.

In her recent video, co-produced with Suzie Silver, titled Mistakes and Lies, part two she coaxes numerous collaborating subjects (actors responding to an open casting call to be the artist) to reveal unexpected personal revelations about themselves. Initially, the scripted text refers to characteristic descriptions about the artist herself but Carroll's direction (and editing) turns the tables on them. This psychological operation (what the military calls psy-op) resonates with today's "media war on propaganda" and other big brother type of communication strategies.

Her photographic work The Center and The Scoff documents a stolen car being hoisted by crane into a dense forest. This is both a pun on land art of the sixties and public sculpture which oftentimes puzzles the general viewer as to its meaning. Also in the show is a series of 6 op-art style "paintings" silk-screened onto the surface of Formica distill a subtle aspect of corporate culture--specifically those graphic pattern designs on the inside of the envelopes used by financial institutions to mask the sensitive contents of their memos and mail. Their machined aesthetic also refers to color theory and Andy Warhol's camouflage paintings.

Language and image being the domain of daily newspapers, Carroll emphasizes the subject matter in Mistakes & Lies with an 8 by 4 print representing the New York Times corrections column culled from her extensive collection of clippings. Here, the paper of record fixes misstated information once initially accepted as fact, and the artist magnifies our own interpretation of current events.

In Mistakes & Lies it's not what been left in, but rather what's been emphasized, misinterpreted, or altogether ignored…

Max Henry

Mary Ellen Carroll
Mistakes and Lies II