Carla Bengtson

ARTIST BIO

Carla Bengtson’s site-responsive projects, situated in wild, domestic, and liminal spaces, create possible/impossible situations in which to attempt interspecies communication.

Bengtson has received numerous awards, including an Oregon Arts Commission Integrative Sciences Award and an NEA Individual Grant for Artists, and has held residencies at Djerassi, the Ucross Foundation, the Tiputini Biodiversity Research Station in the Amazon, and a Signal Fire Outpost Residency at the Arizona/Mexico border. Selected exhibitions include Gridspace, New York; POP Gallery, Queensland, Australia; JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, California; Art Fair Miami; RKL Gallery, New York; the Painting Center, New York; the Portland Art Museum; and the Holter Museum of Art, Helena, MT. Bengtson has lectured on environmental thought at International Environmental Philosophy and Biodiversity Conservation Conferences in the US, Canada, and South America.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My Falling Out Spilling Over projects explore the slippage and the spillage—or what falls out, or escapes, and what spills over, or returns, from every net of understanding we attempt to cast over nonhuman nature. In these playful mediations between human and nonhuman systems of knowing, media act as surrogates in the forest of signs, interrogating what might be seen and what might be said between species.