A Curator’s Walkthrough of Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons

by Iris Colburn

Installation view, Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, MCA Chicago, Aug 3, 2024–Feb 2, 2025. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.

In this exhibition walkthrough, curator Iris Colburn provides an overview of Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, describing Carlson’s unique approach to landscape. Andrea Carlson is the 26th artist to participate in the MCA’s Chicago Works, a solo exhibition series featuring artists who are shaping contemporary art in the city and beyond.

Andrea Carlson’s solo exhibition Shimmer on Horizons brings together a series of recent works that, grounded in Anishinaabe understandings of space and time, reflect on how land carries memories of ongoing colonial expansion and resistance to it. This exhibition was shaped in large part by my close relationship with Carlson, whom I have known since 2017. Over the years and our friendship, I have made a couple of observations that informed this exhibition and its focus on landscape. First, Carlson, who is Grand Portage Ojibwe, has done significant work to push cultural institutions in Chicago, including the MCA, to better engage—or in many cases, start to engage—Indigenous peoples, communities, and histories. And second, many of her recent solo presentations have been public artworks, like her monumental installation on Chicago’s Riverwalk that proclaims You Are On Potawatomi Land/Bodéwadmikik ėthë yéyék. But Carlson has also been prolific in the studio, making this exhibition a beautiful opportunity to present work—video, sculpture, and painting—in a gallery context, while still examining how settler colonialism has transformed the land and our relationships to it.

The exhibition takes its title from Throwing Muses’ song “Shimmer,” in which the singer describes herself as unreachable, “a shimmer on the horizon.” Carlson’s landscapes similarly refuse to be possessed or made fully legible. If artists have long employed the horizon to render territories as empty and available, Carlson subverts this convention. Recalling the sightlines of her homelands on Lake Superior, she organizes her compositions along horizons, densely layering personal and cultural motifs to create prismatic landscapes that become sites of memory and possibility.

The MCA is a particularly interesting place to present Carlson’s work: the museum is steps away from Lake Michigan and on city-engineered landfill that artificially extended the lake’s shoreline. Carlson’s installation You Are On Potawatomi Land surfaces this reality, drawing inspiration from the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi’s 1914 lawsuit against the city, in which they point out that since this land did not exist when the treaties concerning the Chicago area were signed, it was never ceded. Reflecting on her MCA exhibition, Carlson shared, “My seascapes have re-watered that area and have re-shimmered the watery horizon there.” Following Carlson, this exhibition invites us to consider further the layered, reverberating histories held within the landscape—of not only colonial expansion and violence but also resistance and renewal—and the alternative worlds they offer us.

The exhibition opens with a kind of horizon line: the video installation Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 – Nibi Ezhi-Nisidawaabanjigaade Ozhibii’igeowin 071200, which spans five monitors alongside a printed essay. Made with artist Rozalinda Borčila, this work critiques wetland banking. Like carbon offsets, this market enables producers to theoretically “offset” their destruction of wetlands in one place by purchasing credits generated from wetland banks—wetlands created, restored, or enhanced—elsewhere. Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 presents footage of Chicago-area wetland banks refracted into pulsating rows that disrupt the horizon, evoking both how the market abstracts land into economic units and how land holds layers of history. Speaking directly to this history, the artists’ footage also includes signage in public parks that refers to the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which was completed in 1848. This canal’s construction profoundly altered the ecological systems of the Midwestern wetlands over which investors now speculate. By interweaving canal-related signage with footage of wetland banks, the artists reveal how the wetland market relies on and perpetuates older colonial practices of violently reshaping the landscape for economic gain.

Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 also inspired the exhibition’s layout. In the inner room, paintings envelop the walls like a multi-channel video installation, while a sculpture sits in the middle of the space. This arrangement hints at how Carlson’s paintings are informed by time-based media: composed of paper panels organized into a grid, they borrow the format of film strips and panoramic photographs to picture a landscape at multiple moments. Why paper? Carlson says, “Landscapes get papered away [through mechanisms like treaties], but through paper, we can also imagine them back.”

Reclaiming paper from its colonial associations, Carlson’s paintings evoke personal experiences while challenging imperialism’s technologies. Each row of panels is organized along its own horizon, while cultural and personal motifs refract diagonally across the work. As they ripple outward, the motifs’ scale increases, recalling how waves lap onto the shore. Though these landscapes are imagined, they recall Carlson’s experiences of walking beside Lake Superior, gazing at its horizon. Multiplied across her surfaces, this line also creates spatial tensions that resonate with Ojibwe philosophy, where the meeting of perceived opposites—like the earth and sky at the horizon—is a powerful gesture.

Carlson’s paintings also subvert the landscape genre’s colonial legacies. Artists have often used the horizon to frame land as vast and empty, ripe for the taking. Simultaneously, perspectival lines pull viewers into the image, inviting them to imagine the landscape as their own. Carlson upends these strategies that describe land as something to be owned and controlled: she interrupts her horizons with a plethora of motifs in continuous movement, while her diagonal compositions create prismatic scenes that fragment any one fixed perspective. Like horizons or shorelines, at a remove or always in flux, Carlson’s pictured landscapes resist containment or full legibility: they are meant to be experienced, not possessed.

Similarly to Hydrologic Unit Code, these paintings’ layers evoke how land carries history, while their motifs form loose allegories that reflect on the mechanics of memory, particularly amidst ongoing settler colonialism. For instance, Cast a Shadow, the first painting in the exhibition, was created in 2021 alongside global debates over monuments and collective memory. It features recurring imagery related to commemoration, including mounds, games, and a tombstone. Carlson also understands drawing itself as a repetitive practice that reinforces memory. Echoing this idea, she repeats motifs—like mountains that resemble icebergs—both within and across works. Recent paintings engage with memory in more personal and introspective ways: Perpetual Care was inspired by her great-grandaunt’s drawing of a horse, while Ancestor and Descendant is what Carlson calls a “kinscape,” playing on the words kinship and landscape. Yet, across the paintings, predetermined narratives remain elusive, reflecting both the memory’s fugitive nature and her desire to protect it from colonial erasure.

Carlson’s critique of colonialism also extends to its institutions, including museums. Her recent painting Perpetual Genre lines the interior gallery’s final wall and pictures two sculptures that appear to be cannibals, both held in museums’ collections. Rendering land-surveying instruments above the sculptures, Carlson frames institutional collecting and colonial expansion as insatiable acts of consumption, taking and taking without end. She has also connected this reading to her approach to landscape, proposing that “The museum is a landscape in its own right, accreting and assimilating objects foreign to itself.” In other words, the museum is not a neutral repository, but a constructed, dynamic space shaped by colonial structures and histories.

Nearby, the sculpture The Surveyor’s Obstacle complements Perpetual Genre’s subversion of colonial expansion and its institutions. Composed of wooden columns, the sculpture references the effigy staffs that rest within some Indigenous earthworks known as mounds, many of which are burial sites. These earthworks lie across the Midwestern US and beyond, but many continue to be destroyed by ongoing colonial expansion, including through agriculture, state infrastructure, and mining. In a way, Carlson’s inclusion of this work, created specifically for this exhibition, reasserts a mound’s form into the cityscape—and into a museum that has often excluded Indigenous artists, communities, and histories.