Carrie Gundersdorf

The abstract paintings and drawings in Carrie Gundersdorf’s exhibition, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” are grounded in space. With titles like Star Trails-58 Minutes and Two Widths of the Epsilon Ring-violet & navy version, our thoughts turn not just to the heavens, but to the technology that observes it. The relationship between art and science is tenuous, yet a common platform for many abstractionists today is to aestheticize science. This can be problematic; it’s as if pure abstraction were not enough on its own and artists feel the need to justify themselves through references to string theory. While in danger of this, Gundersdorf’s work escapes the trap.

The strongest piece is Two Widths, a simple graphic composition of two parallelograms side by side (presumably the two scans of Uranus’ Epsilon Ring). The painting works because instead of an astronomy lesson, it feels like an invitation to think of the fantastic qualities of space. Space means a lot of things here. There’s pictorial space—the way the dark background recedes and the light foreground advances. When this happens within a nonrepresentational image, it’s called abstract space. Our understanding of outer space operates the way abstract space does—purely through our mental picture of the idea of space, like an illustration in a geometry book. In Gundersdorf’s paintings, all these forms of space are present, making for a unique body of work.—Erik Wenzel