Andrea Carlson’s first museum survey, Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky features 30 works including three large-scale paintings presented together for the first time—as the artist originally intended them to be shown. Carlson (descended from the Grand Portage band of Ojibwe and European settlers, born 1979) creates works that challenge injustices caused by settler narration, while utilizing a combination of text and complex visual references to animals, art objects and cultural belongings. These elements are organized in prismatic layers of colorful landscape, which the artist views as “inferred political space.”

Carlson’s practice challenges assumed hierarchies, considers who holds the right of possession and how power is retained through objects such as paintings. Her works challenge visitors’ perspectives and inspire questions about permission and refusal through carefully and beautifully painted objects in compositions that are visually and emotionally complex.

Known for her intricate, colorful works drawn and painted with many different mediums, Carlson recently expanded her practice to include sculpture. The Denver Art Museum commissioned Columns for a Horizon, a large-scale sculptural work which consists of individual wooden poles of varying lengths. This sculpture, when placed in front of Carlson’s painted works, denies entry into her imagined landscapes and encourages viewers to contemplate ideas of access and denial.