The Smoke Portal Project / Art Show and Opening - cancelled
Goldminers Daughter Lodge ‘Yoga Room’
Friday, April 14 | 3pm- 7pm | Artist Reception and Show
Friday, April 15 | 12pm- 4pm | Art Show
Artist Statement:
The smoke portals exist in a world of altered air quality, and speak to the environment we find ourselves in in this Mountain West Basin. During wildfire season, wintertime inversions, and the ever-looming threat of the Great Salt Lake Dust Bowl, landscapes become invisible. The whole world is condensed to a bubble of one’s immediate surroundings. The vastness and the distance cease to exist. These paintings offer portals of hope, revealing the way the landscape exists underneath, an imaginary utopia of clear sky and color. These paintings ask the question: can we use the power of our presence to give our lives value and meaning, or even hope?
Artists Bio: Caro was the 2022 ACE Artist Grant Winner
Caro Nilsson’s dream-like, impressionistic landscapes pull the viewer into a specific place that feels outside of time. Gestural marks eddy beneath swaths of changed color or tactile embroidery thread. Caro’s paintings and murals straddle the line between real and imaginary- understanding the notion that everything is always both. At its heart, Caro’s work is about a personal relationship with landscapes, and all of the human and non-human influences and presences within them. Rooted in traditions of impressionism, Caro’s paintings depict worlds in which the act of observation (beyond just that of sight) plays a role in their creation. By simply noticing magic within the mundane, the world that we live in becomes full of mystery and excitement, a world of hidden stories, meant to be uncovered by those who take the time to listen.
Caro was born in Vancouver, Washington and has spent her entire life building relationships with the land in America’s endlessly variable biomes- and translating those feelings and findings into paintings. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art with a Distinguished Major in Printmaking, and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia. She completed her first solo painting residency at the Dacha in Mystic, CT in the Spring of 2021, and currently lives as a multi-media painter and muralist, painting full time from Salt Lake City
