Amelia Carley
Amelia Carley’s work engages with the interpretation of memories within a landscape and fictitious sites. Born and raised in Colorado, Carley received a BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MFA from Georgia State University. She has participated in several Artist-in-Residence programs, including Vermont Studio Center and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Carley has exhibited at venues such as 5-50 Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Southampton Art Center, Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art, Hathaway Contemporary, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, SOMArts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Main Window Dumbo, and Aqua Art Fair, Miami. Amelia Carley currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Artist Statement
Amelia Carley’s work explores fabricated landscapes as a means to reflect on ecological anxiety, loss, and the blurred boundaries between the natural and artificial. Influenced by her upbringing traveling through the deserts of the American West, Carley constructs surreal environments that evoke both beauty and decay. These imagined places become a site for escapism and experimentation, where color theory, lighting, and form converge to investigate the shifting conditions of the Anthropocene.
Central to her process is the creation of dioramas made from a wide range of found or reused materials, such as gathered sea glass from Glass Bottle Beach on Dead Horse Bay, a former landfill in southeast Brooklyn, as well as single-use plastics—melted and manipulated—from her own household use. Reclaiming these materials, she uses colored lights on the dioramic forms to replicate certain times of day or moods before photographing them to use as painting reference. The resulting scenes depict fantastical terrains rendered in hyper-saturated, toxic hues, evoking landscapes shaped by human impact and environmental instability.
Through vibrant color palettes and imagined environments, Carley examines the ways in which our experiences of nature are increasingly mediated, synthetic, and uncertain. By merging personal waste with historical debris, Carley considers how we often experience nature through layers of mediation. These works contemplate where “natural” and “artificial” overlap through representations of a fictitious environment.
www.ameliacarley.com
