Finding Amelia Press Release

Posted by Carla Caletti

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

4.8.2022

Carla Caletti
Range West Gallery
2861 NM-14, Madrid, NM
415.531.8205
carla@carlacaleeti.com

 

Range West Gallery: “Finding Amelia”

– Abstract figurative paintings and sculpture by Madrid Artist Carla Caletti

Exhibition to run from April 20, 2022 to June 1, 2022

Reception with the Artist on Saturday, April 23, 2022, from 4 to 7 pm

 

Madrid, New Mexico: Range West Gallery, owned by artists Kathleen Casey and Joshua Gannon, is one of Madrid’s longest running and successful galleries. Beginning April 20th, they are featuring a solo exhibition of abstract figurative paintings and sculptures by local artist Carla Caletti. At her Mining Time Studio in Madrid, Carla paints abstracted figures in liminal spaces and constructs sculptural forms from found and recycled materials. The deconstructed forms are inspired by her art practice of mending and repair, gathering disparate parts and fragments and creating new forms and associations.

Caletti first visited northern New Mexico in 1985. Inspired by the land and people, she became a yearly visitor. In March of 2020, just before the onset of the pandemic, Caletti moved her home and studio to New Mexico, from Oakland, CA. Over the course of the last two years, she has worked in her old miner’s cabin studio day after day, making a series of 54 small evocative paintings of abstracted figures that she describes as “superheroes and guardians that slip in through the cracks”. These maquettes for future works were a response to the contraction of the pandemic and the social justice movement and challenges in the bigger world. The lifting of Covid restrictions, along with settling into her new life in New Mexico, motivated Caletti to enlarge the scale of her work. The invitation for a solo show at Range West Gallery was an opportunity include several larger paintings with a new body of work she had started. This process of leaving her small works behind, she says, “has held its challenges relative to scale, materials and surfaces”. This personal journey of meeting challenges with creativity and commitment is the subtext for “Finding Amelia”, her show’s title, which is a reference to “finding those parts of us that get lost along the way, picking up the threads and sewing them back into the fabric of our lives, in new and transformative ways.”

As a self-taught artist, Caletti began painting 21 years ago when pregnant with her daughter. Since that time, she has forged her own path in how she makes her work and what materials she chooses to use. She has learned to use acrylic paint, wax and paper to create texture and layers that she can add to and subtract from. Kathleen describes the work in terms of dynamic polarities: “grounded and scattered, expansive and intimate, engaging and fleeting”. Caletti says this dynamic “comes working of working from an inner landscape and mapping worlds both real and imagined”. Her sculptures have a totemic quality and like her paintings, lead us to wonder about their land of origin. That wonder creates a portal, in both paintings and sculptures, where we can return again and again to query our own stories and journeys.