Karen Perl

Karen Perl paints the streets, the buildings, the byways and intersections of the city she was born in and continues to live in today. Perl graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA in 1986. A painter and printmaker, her work is a personal investigation of people and places. Perl spontaneously begins a painting by referencing the many city intersections she has photographed and painted en plein air over the years. As she develops the composition, a story evolves. Perl states that this story is what holds interest for her, a sense of meaning and narrative that is not linear. She describes it as investigating the world around her as if in a dream. Whether she uses actual photographs of distinct places, or combines architectural forms, her expansive terrains describe a place that she describes as "attempting to get back to something, but it's not there anymore". The work is like a theatrical setting. The facades of buildings are present, but possibly just surface. This illusion persists through Perl's limited use of texture and scraping off, as well as a restricted intensity of the landscape palate. Perl's figures, human and canine alike, often feel like transitory beings, here and yet not. Perl often has a dog in her paintings and makes "no bones" about these creatures as a proxy for herself. Walking into the field she has created, searching or in stasis, comforting or at ease, this guide exists in a space beyond the everyday, yet in the context of it. There is a silence in the response of a being so present and not speaking that becomes more internal than external. Her work is of imperfect memories, mystical and dreamlike.