"Unroll Your Carpet and We Shall See What is in Your Heart". 2004
Oil & acrylic paint, motor oil, Sumi ink on canvas (48"H x 44"W x 2"D)

INSIGHT AND CRITICAL SOCIAL COMMENTARY

In 1966, art historial peter Selz mused that the preoccupation of “a new generation…seems perhaps more affected by [human] ability to leave the earth and move into outer space than by [its] failures on this planet.” Selz noted that modernism has produced innumerable conflicts that demand public reaction, not the least of which include the environment, war in the Middle East, and domestic injustices, global conflicts into visual concepts. In North Carolina, Ron Rozelle and Caroleigh Robinson picture industrialization and the destruction of the environment in the form of newly imagined modern icons.

"....Caroleigh Robinson evokes environmental ruin and the stain of human presence in a series of abstract paintings that detail North Carolina road construction. Her series 'leaping Pigments & other Painterly Tracks-carpet stories (2004) resembles the abstract tachism of European painting in the late 40's and early 1950's, where artists literally blotted and stained the canvas with expressive spots (tache) of paint. Through the acuteness of her process, Robinson accurately documents the devastation inflicted on the land as a result of road expansion, applying pigments and embedded motor oil to paper and canvas. Her paintings begin as topographical maps, in which, she paints bright colors, which over time alter into darker colors, until her paintings are primarily composed of grays and browns that evoke the expanding road system of North Carolina and the environmental impact that this progress neglects. These paintings also recall italian painter Alberto Burri's Sacks of the 1950s, where Burri combined nonart materials such as tar, mold, and wheat sacks to emphasis the natural decay of material elements and to connect aesthetic matter with social process. Like Rozelle, but using very different means, Robinson comments on the abuse and ruin of nature through the accumulation of toxic waste to show the mutability and scarring of a polluted environment."

Ron Rozelle, Caroleigh Robinson, Connie Bostic, and De Wayne Barton evoke the sentiments of a shared human experience and societal concern. The universality of their subjects transcends the mere differences in their styles and media, as well as sets them apart from any parochial regionalism.

Jessica West. (2005) Duke University. Road in Sight (catalog). pp.20-32.