Xela Institute of Art is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Constellation, a solo presentation of work by Carla Jay Harris. The exhibition will be on view and open to the public at Xela Institute of Art from Saturday, June 3, 2023 through Sunday, September 3, 2023.
In 2020, San Pedro-based artist Carla Jay Harris won a commission from the new Magic Johnson Park in the Willowbrook neighborhood of South-Los Angeles to install a 100-foot mural, enswirling the new building’s entryway. Formerly the home of the Athens Oil Tank Farm, the park has been reclaimed from polluters to create a recreation area benefiting the surrounding community, complete with ponds, lawns, and meeting spaces. Harris spent six months meticulously composing the permanent mural.
A graduate of UCLA’s MFA program, Harris honed her methods under Catherine Opie, Mary Kelly, and James Welling, creating a vernacular that blends traditional photographic methods with painterly abstraction and digital collage. In her home studio, Harris photographs trusted friends and actors as subjects, using a character or mythology to bolster their performance, transforming them into digital assets, and placing them in a dreamy world of her own device. Harris frequently draws or paints over the prints, likening the process to embellishment – further distancing and complicating the work from its photographic beginnings.
Since UCLA, Harris has produced bodies of work that explore autobiography and blackness; domesticity and place-making, but recently has been considering the relevance of mythology to cultural identity and the human figure. A child of a military officer, Harris and her family hopped from base to base, spending years of her youth in Italy and Germany. Each place, in vastly different ways, has engaged with these mythological traditions in pursuit of political advantage.
“So much of this Greco-Roman work is about looking for truth and trying to make sense of the world around you,” she says. “This history belongs to all of us.”
“I’ve been reading African folk stories. I wanted this work to engage with my roots and the Greco-Roman. Their mythology has this classical, canonized version of history, and I wanted to look at my own, black, African-American history and tell stories that haven’t been told.”
Carla Jay Harris is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Harris' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Paris, and Quebec. She completed undergraduate coursework at the School of Visual Arts in New York, received her bachelor's degree with distinction from the University of Virginia, and then received her MFA from UCLA in 2015. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Her works are included in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; USC’s Fisher Museum; The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, Orange, CA; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Sherbrook, Quebec, Canada; John Hopkins University Law School, Baltimore, MD; as well as the corporate collections of General Mills; Creative Artists Agency; META (Facebook) Inc, and the LA Metro.
View Xela Institute of Art
