“Cresentmine” by Beau Carey, image courtesy of the artist.

Beau Carey: River School
August 23 – October 28, 2012 @ BMoCA

Beau Carey’s paintings reflect the artist’s contemplative stance on place and its cultural implications. Vast surroundings, environments, and situations are conveyed in his landscape-based works through formalized compositions that focus on fundamental elements, sometimes reduced to the point of vertical or horizontal bands of color as reference to environmental components.

With Carey’s move from New Mexico to Colorado in 2010, the paintings have undergone a distinct shift from the restrained renderings of expansive spaces that extend far into the horizon, to more vivid depictions of waterfalls and dramatic impressions of the Rocky Mountains. Carey attributes this not only to the change in his immediate environment, but also to the historical references he found himself unable to disregard when interpreting scenes he was too familiar with through the work of such pioneering painters of the American West as Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Remington.

Beau Carey was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1980 and moved to Denver, Colorado in 2010. He received his BFA (2006) and MFA (2010) from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He is currently a resident artist at RedLine Denver. Carey has exhibited extensively throughout New Mexico, including the 2012 exhibition Monday Afternoon at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, juried by Lucy Lippard and Joel-Peter Witkin.