Deric Carner: I Am Happy About the Sky

Mask with Long Nose, 2020, Pigmented plaster and acrylic, 14 x 10 x 1 ½ in.
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Artist’s Statement:

A face, a pair of shoes, an abstract limb, bent and tied, a portal with bananas—these are the elements that encircle a practice concerned with the body and the psyche as a malleable and always-becoming object. Often damaged and yearning for more, the body-psyche contorts and embellishes to fly higher in the sky and further into the dark spaces of the imagination.

In the peculiar world of Deric Carner’s creation, each being birthed is a marvel of nonchalance and ambiguity–tickling, teasing, and triggering embarrassment and delight. These manifestations, the progeny of a fertile and impish mind, are created with such sensuous empathy for the inanimate that they seem to have willed themselves into existence on their own. You may see them as the escapees of the collective modern psyche–bizarre-yet-humdrum, irrational, crossbred, blobular, ambiguous, kinky, and mischievous. —Michelle Levy

Artist’s Bio:
Deric Carner was born in Virginia and lives and works in New York and New Jersey. He has had solo shows at the Garment District Alliance Space for Public Art, Romer Young Gallery, Trestle Projects, Four AM, Louis V E.S.P., and Tent Rotterdam. Carner has been included in numerous group shows including at Foreland, FIERMAN, Proto Gallery, Radiator Gallery, Present Company, NurtureArt, EFA Project Space, Southern Exposure, and CAC Vilnius. He has had residencies at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, and Root Division. He received an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NL, and a BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz