Nearing Each Other: Jamie Earnest

Nearing Each Other, the 89th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Series, invites us to reimagine our own complex connections to place as a site of unfolding relationships. In this exhibition, place may be an environment, a material experience, or a memory to suggest notions of belonging and transformation.

Jamie Earnest’s painting Beautiful Soul (2021) is the beginning of the artist’s ongoing body of work that questions the dualities of what is seen and unseen, playing with tensions of allusion and illusion. Earnest returns to memories and idiosyncrasies from her upbringing in rural Alabama, employing symbols, such as a candy cross, and reconstructing domestic spaces to explore modes of collective memory in the American South. While certain paintings depict intimate interior settings, like a living room, others obscure the viewer’s perception. The artist is interested in challenging the viewer’s position as an onlooker or subject in the scene. Lurking shadows and silhouettes of hands that enter into the paintings further complicate subjectivity in relation to Earnest’s paintings, evoking a dissonance and uncanniness that is typical of the artist’s practice.