Jay Carrier, Wolf Clan, Onondaga/Tuscarora Nations (1963-2025)

In 2021, Hallwalls presented Jay Carrier: Free to Roam, a solo exhibition with a catalog supported by Dome Art Advisory. That exhibition’s text appropriately provides context for this work:

Carrier's work emphatically reflects the hybrid nature of his identity and worldview. Born Native yet raised off the reservation, Carrier's palette often demonstrates Native motifs and colors, though just as frequently utilize modernist motifs, fields of abstraction, text, or pop culture references. His works wander between worlds—sometimes sociopolitical, sometimes philosophical, sometimes more akin to a dream state in which all worlds collide. If anything is dominant throughout Carrier's paintings, it is the natural world—its colors, textures, and often the explicit material substance of the natural world mixed with painting media. Acrylic, oil, chalk, paint sticks, spray paint, pencil, and graphite combine themselves naturally with rust, sand, leaves, ashes, and wood. Carrier makes no hard distinction between materials, as he makes no hard distinction in his own identity and the work he creates—it is the hybrid identity and its expression that predominates the work.

Carrier's experience of the world—a Native man coming of age in a small city on the edge of waterfalls, gorges, and forests—becomes an emotional autobiography he is documenting throughout his work. Family history plays a part, but so does art history. Dreams are potent cues, but so is the actual environment. The ideas Carrier expresses are not didactic because the spirit that creates the work is wide and not narrow, open to a deep experience of the world and not proscribed by singular visions. Carrier's visions are free to roam.