When I was a little kid, my dream job was to be a department store makeup artist.
When I laid in bed at night, I went to my mind palace inside the store. I was surrounded by layers and rows of glosses, powders, creams, and chalks-organizing colors and textures and feelings into perfect, prisitine combinations. I would walk around, re-organizing everything until it sat just right. Sometimes a combo would consist of dull-wide-matte things, or pointy-long-dark things, or frosty-translucent-perfumed things. Sometimes they would overlap unexpectedly. Here everything made sense in the most primal, sensory way. Even when I left the mind palace, I had a newfound technique for organizing my surroundings and shaping my world aesthetically. Seeing Karah’s paintings is the closest thing that I’ve found to that childhood place.
It would feel like a disservice to try and “explain” Karah’s work in any kind of didactic sense. Like most paintings, they’re better served by visually consuming them rather than just talking about them. Unlike most paintings, they take me back to my most natural and youthful way of thinking and describing art. It’s hard for me to intellectualize or decode them using words. Karah’s paintings ARE the alphabet itself. One is not enough, each work is a new letter-or word-or feeling. Strung together they’re an entire perfectly worded sentence, a whole neighborhood of houses, a full day of listening to the same radio station, every single aisle in a grocery store. Rather than try to turn the work into a complicated essay by decoding and interpreting them, I’d like to instead present zoomed in photos of a few of her paintings, and offer a few words describing feelings and experiences they surface for me. Merely showing you a photo of the paintings on a digital platform would be an incomplete representation of the work, so here’s 6 intentionally cropped ones as a teaser-a chef’s “bite of the day,” a movie trailer, a sephora makeup sample.