Always use your powers for awesome.  My best friend Mary X is a science wizard – always has been.  She is many things, but her image has come to represent female scientific badassery.

I have made a limited run of these.  One, super delux framed 12×16 masterwork. Twenty, 8×10 signed and editioned prints on museum-quality paper.  They look hawt!

Find them at ETSY or email me: sarah at sarahcarneycreative dot com.

A work I’m calling “Nikki Power” was my featured image at the art show YOU CAN GO AND LOOK AT RIGHT NOW at the Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Here’s what went into making it.

Signed and editioned 8×10 prints are for sale.  $25.  These are premium prints on badass archival paper, and the colors are amazing live and in person.  She’ll come to you in a sweet archival comic book baggie with some cardboard so no bending.

I’m not the photographer, by the way.  That’s Mike. Or Lisa.  Or other people with cameras.  Photography requires mastery over a contraption.  There are numbers, too, and measurements and tri-corder readings.  So there are photographs of this event, but I didn’t take them.  I am only in them and around them and using them to give you a visual aide.

Parts of the Whole

Featuring Sarah Carney, Brad Miller, and Mike Machian

Hot Shops Art Center, Omaha Nebraska, August 6 – 26, 2011

Brad Miller is the one who put this all together.  He’s been showing in Omaha for a couple of years now and is chummy with all the players and knows about things like framing, matting and putting holes in walls.  I’m grateful for his encouragement and guidance and our stream-of-consciousness art-talks over the phone this year.

Since Brad, Mike and I are coming from three very different media and subject matter we kind of wondered this whole time what would hold this show together.  Creating a theme artificially just didn’t give any of us good feelings and we proceeded down a path of doing what we do best the best we can.  Hanging the show on Friday was really where the fun came in.  All the work is in the room and we just began setting it against the wall one at a time, each piece being set down in kind of response to the one before it.  I think we did a good job with it, achieved a kind of diverse rhythm as you moved around the room either way.

The turn-out was great and again I was overwhelmed at all the faces old and new who stopped in for the experience.  All my work has a story behind it because they are about characters real or otherwise, so when the conversation called of it I got to share those stories.  And again, I had the gift of hearing what stories other people saw in my work, and the faces of their friends and family I’d inadvertently depicted.

I showed what I’m calling digitally manipulated drawings.  Basically P’shopped pencil sketches.  The sketches were made over the last year-ish, and I tried to do them in a playful state of mind, the same place where I used to draw as a teenager.  Just for fun, no expectations, drawing what made me feel good, what intrigued me.  Maybe it’s the rats from Animal Farm, maybe it’s my dog as she sleeps in some contorted pose.  I’ve decided not to try and conceal the pencil marks as one might with other digital painting, instead doing everything I could to make them the focus.  I dunno.  The pencil’s the good stuff so no reason to try and be someone else and hide it.  :B  So I do add color and texture but they seem more like washes than actual painting.

There are many sides to the experience and I hope to deal with them in their own posts as time goes on.  I mean, I’ve yet to show the internet the work itself, and there was also a music video filmed in the gallery on Sunday.  There’s lots to process.

I got to speak a great deal with Mike Krainak at the Omaha Print Guild Art Show on August 7. He reviewed the show in Shout! Omaha. The whole article is below.

He says some nice things about me, which is way cool.

“Wallace and Carney also offer strong illustrative figures and narratives in a caricature style. [...] As for Carney, a new talent on Omaha’s horizon who hails from Ames, Iowa, her three digitally manipulated drawings represent some of the more creative and complex contemporary work in the show.  This is particularly true of her enigmatic, elongated figure of color, Theodora and the sullen and melancholy figure slumped in a chair in Waiting who looks like a character from an O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe short story.  What others have done in more traditional printmaking, Carney has managed in a 21st century format without sacrificing the same principles of composition, color and form.”

On August 7 of this summer, I was honored to show three digital prints with the Omaha Print Guild in their final art show.  It was my first art show since high school and it was thrilling.  I’m grateful to Amy Haney for putting everything together, and to Mike Krainak for his glowing review of the show in Shout! Omaha.

I’d never been to an art show before and I’m not sure what I was expecting.  This show was alive and loud!  People everywhere weren’t just breezing through, passively glancing through the art.  They were talking, gesturing, unabashedly pointing at and discussing the prints on the walls.  They’d make a slow, thoughtful lap, then return to pieces they wanted to see more of.  I was doing the same things, excited by the variety and the vividly new ideas people had come up with and committed to paper.  I was amazed to see my work being stared at and talked about.  I’ve never felt that before – that my work meant something to someone else.

I know what kind of emotion went into Waiting and Science, what those mean to me, the feeling I was trying to communicate with those two figures.  But it was an entirely new and moving experience to hear that people were excited and uplifted by Science, and the people who saw themselves in Waiting to the point of seeing old Knox as a woman.  People kept coming back to stare at Waiting, reportedly unsettled by Knox and his posture in that room of his.  It gave a couple people a worried feeling, and an anticipation of wanting to know the rest of the story.  I’m just amazed at that experience, of emotions I put out into the world through art being honestly reciprocated.

I was happy to elucidate with my standard enthusiasm who Mary X is and why she’s in Science.  I slightly more hesitant to gush forth about who Knox Greyfriar is and where he comes from inside me, but I overcame that self-consciousness of being a Harry Potter role-player and just went with honesty.

A friend of mine, James W. took some really insightful photographs not so much of the pieces, but of people engaging them.  It wasn’t out of some ego that I enjoyed seeing people stare into one of my prints, honestly.  I was fascinated that something I created of my own emotion called forth emotion in another person.  It felt like I’d communicated something individual and universal.

Another exciting detail was selling Science.  Someone gave this new artist from Ames a chance to hang on a wall. :)

I’m grateful to Amy Haney for putting everything together, and to Mike Krainak for his glowing review of the show in Shout! Omaha. I’m also very happy that Brad Miller tipped me off and I could share that special day with him during his first solo show.

Dancing has brought me the exciting opportunity to put my art on real walls! “Science” and “Bear on Fire” are hung happily in a gallery exhibit comprised of the favorite works of instructors at Iowa State University’s The Workspace.

The work from the other instructors is incredibly diverse and really really cool. It’s neat to see them stepping out of their roles as instructors, and sometimes stepping out of their normal genres, to express themselves. If you’re local, stop by during the month of July.

A giant thanks to Brad Miller for counselling me on how to prepare digital images for print, and how mat and frame for the wall. He rushed my print work though and cut mats for me – he’s a genius friend. I admire his generosity considering how hard he’s working to make his art dream a reality as well.  He’s amazing, so check him out, I link again.

Hopefully I’ll be able to show my work alongside his at the Omaha Print Guild’s show in August! I’m hoping to show three pieces there, “Science” (above) and “Theodora” and “Knox Waits”.

Just as this journal’s done, these shows are giving me a living audience for work that used to be private by default. There’s nothing to lose, and everything to gain. I don’t think my art’s been public since high school and that’s really something, innit.