
Artist Rosie Carter works in the realm of nostalgia, in that dreamlike place where the familiar bumps up against the strange. It’s a place of history and of myths, of real places and make-believe people, permeated with sunshine and a sweet, oddly familiar tune playing softly in the background.
Working out of her studio at the Road X Complex, a 1947 metal quonset hut in Yellow Jacket, Colorado, she is surrounded by the remote high desert country of the Four Corners. It’s a place of wide skies and high-flying flocks of birds, a place of magical landscapes and secret hideouts. And it’s place where people have a history of resilience and devotion: Native Americans with their homelands, pioneers with their homesteads, farmers and ranchers with their fields and range.
In this place Rosie gathers up scraps from the past – inspiration comes from the land and landscape, materials from salvaged metal and wire, ideas from vintage artifacts – and spins them into new objects that express a lovely and slightly off kilter combination of the wistful and the weird.