Featured artist:

Carrie Pearce creates haunting images of long-dead children drawn from historic photographs. Caught in an amorphous world of childhood images and texts, the children peer out at us from deep in the past. As we contemplate at these elegant but anonymous portraits, we are forced to consider human identity and its impact over time.

French poet Andre Breton began his first surrealist novel, Nadja, by considering the relationship between the self and the haunting presences that define the self. “Who am I?” he asked. “If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’.” The children in late nineteenth century photographs haunt Pearce in the same way that the gamine Nadja haunted Breton.

Because Pearce transforms the small, dusty photographs into beautifully limned paintings, the children begin to haunt us as well. Who was this child, dressed in white, standing solemnly before a graffiti-soiled wall? Did she become a woman, have children of her own? Who was this ghostly boy with preternaturally white skin and waist-long white hair? Why did his parents not trim his frazzled locks? Why is his face so deeply marked by despair? And who were these two blonde children, dressed in blue, staring so seriously back at us? What about the older child with dark straight hair, the one whose face and torso hovers, disembodied in a golden cloud that rains broken teeth? Who were these children?

Pearce uses traditional painting processes, laying multiple thin layers over deep chiaroscuro underpainting. Light enters the multiple layers of oil and pigment glaze, finds the dark background and shimmers back at us in ghostly evanescence. The artist’s canny use of Renaissance techniques enhances the marvelous presence of her images. They recall another of Breton’s famous assertions: “The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful!”