Carrie Rudd: Squirm
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12.26 is pleased to present Squirm, an exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Carrie Rudd. The dynamic, self-aware, and sensational paintings are filled with humor, perversion, and anxiety. More analytical than cathartic, these expressive canvases serve as filters, sorting through Rudd’s past. Rather than convey a sustained narrative, each painting depicts fragments of the artist’s memories. As Rudd alters the formal arrangements, the memories get retold.
Squirm is named for the visceral reaction the paintings evoke—each painting is an episodic journey through a specific point in Rudd’s memory, capturing the feelings of adolescent discomfort, embarrassment, or the uneasiness of contemporary living. Rudd’s style is unshackled, treating every painting as a distinct challenge, a singular event.
The exhibition title is also a nod to the squirm drive, a revolutionary gear system invented in the 1980s, that produces two gear ratios simultaneously. While the paintings are in dialogue through their formal similarities, each encompasses a pivot point. The gears turn in multiple directions simultaneously and force a new discovery. Rudd delivers a world against either/or, this or that, and prioritizes both/and. She collapses binaries and demands that two things can be true at once.
There is a strong formal and conceptual marriage in Rudd’s paintings. Though fluid, they adhere to a meticulously crafted structure. Each begins with a memory, a conceptual skeleton that evolves alongside the painting. This symbiosis fuels creation; as gears spin, memories are re-enacted in the now. Colors blend, shapes merge, and the structure metamorphoses. Foreground, middle, and background become fused, points of departure from the original memory are made visible, and squirmish movements stretch across the canvas. Memories become reformed, repainted, rewritten.
Carrie Rudd (b. 1994 Hastings on Hudson, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her MFA at Hunter College in 2021. She previously had two solo exhibitions at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Hunter College, Hauser & Wirth, New York, the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York, Superzoom, Paris. This is her first time exhibiting in Texas.
Squirm is named for the visceral reaction the paintings evoke—each painting is an episodic journey through a specific point in Rudd’s memory, capturing the feelings of adolescent discomfort, embarrassment, or the uneasiness of contemporary living. Rudd’s style is unshackled, treating every painting as a distinct challenge, a singular event.
The exhibition title is also a nod to the squirm drive, a revolutionary gear system invented in the 1980s, that produces two gear ratios simultaneously. While the paintings are in dialogue through their formal similarities, each encompasses a pivot point. The gears turn in multiple directions simultaneously and force a new discovery. Rudd delivers a world against either/or, this or that, and prioritizes both/and. She collapses binaries and demands that two things can be true at once.
There is a strong formal and conceptual marriage in Rudd’s paintings. Though fluid, they adhere to a meticulously crafted structure. Each begins with a memory, a conceptual skeleton that evolves alongside the painting. This symbiosis fuels creation; as gears spin, memories are re-enacted in the now. Colors blend, shapes merge, and the structure metamorphoses. Foreground, middle, and background become fused, points of departure from the original memory are made visible, and squirmish movements stretch across the canvas. Memories become reformed, repainted, rewritten.
Carrie Rudd (b. 1994 Hastings on Hudson, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her MFA at Hunter College in 2021. She previously had two solo exhibitions at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Hunter College, Hauser & Wirth, New York, the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York, Superzoom, Paris. This is her first time exhibiting in Texas.
