Carrie Marill

Long after the ASU Art Museum’s groundbreaking “New American City: Artists Look Forward” show came down in 2007, there was a vestige of painter Carrie Marill in the building, just above one of the baseboards in the women’s room — a bright little fragment of a Phoenix landscape, unobtrusive but impossible not to look at once you knew it was there. It was one of several that Marill had placed around the museum in relatively discreet locations for the group show, which brought together 23 artists who lived and worked in Maricopa County at the time.

Walking into the Carrie Marill exhibit at Lisa Sette Gallery in downtown Phoenix is nothing short of a visual delight. Vibrant pin-stripped colors zigzag across Marill’s canvases, which are largely composed of hard geometric forms painted over raw linen. Her aesthetic is a strident balance of manufacture and modernism, or at least, that’s the first impression that one gets upon entering her most recent exhibit. This is because Marill’s paintings hit the senses with the controlled comfort of painstaking consideration that we have all come to associate with the rigor of abstract art’s very best practioners.

Back in May, Rachel Hellman at Galleri Urbane had a spectacular show of shaped, minimalist paintings that used a kind of relief sculpture style, but yet was still a painting. Happening at the same time was the Frank Stella show at the Fort Worth Modern with his hybrids of paintings/ sculptures on display. I guess this kind of work is in the zeitgeist, because Conduit Gallery is now featuring Carrie Marill which also plays in this realm of relief painting, but with some noticeable differences that made me pause, think about the work, and then write.

Exquisitely attuned to the graphic signals of the universe, painter Carrie Marill translates the ephemera of the visual world into intriguing