For Artist Darel Carey: It All Starts With a Line
For Darel Carey, it all begins with the line. From that most elemental figure, a work of art eventually blossoms. “Every single line I place is based off where the last line was, which is based off the line before it, which is based off the line before that,” Carey said recently, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. Placing that first line sets the scheme for the rest of the piece. Each line that comes after speaks directly to the line that came before it in a cycle of repetition and incremental change. As Carey slowly alters the distance between lines, the piece—at least the viewer’s perception of the piece—morphs. Suddenly, strange shapes and visions enter the viewer’s consciousness. What was once a wall with a smattering of straight lines becomes something else—something confusing, even terrifying. The lines engulf the viewer, forcing her to confront the shaky reality of her visual perception. The world, Carey’s art tells us, is not how it appears.
Humans are often wary of such notions. Consider the word “illusion.” Merriam Webster defines “illusion” as “the state or fact of being intellectually deceived or misled: misapprehension.” The thesaurus tells a different story, offering synonyms such as, “dream, fantasy, delusion, daydream, vision, unreality, idea, mirage.” What are we to make of it all? Is illusion an idea? Is it a delusion? Or is it something else entirely?
Where words fail, art fills the void. Carey’s art occupies an uncomfortable realm for us humans because it walks the line between daydream and delusion. How can we trust our own perceptions, our eyesight even, when something as simple as a straight, black line so willfully deceives us and what we believe to be true and real?
Philosophers have grappled with problems of perception for centuries. John Locke, for example, believed humans could only be aware of “mental representations” of reality. Rene Descartes’s famous method of doubt required distrusting whatever wasn’t certain, leaving all perceptions untrustworthy. Our perception of the “real world” doesn’t necessarily represent “reality,” but rather the mind’s interpretation of external data. Carey’s “optical art” exposes the rifts in our perception. The senses deceive us so completely when viewing Carey’s pieces that we see space in a different (perhaps delusional) way. But a central question remains: Is delusion inherently bad? Or is it an opening up of the world and the way we view it? Might it expose us to new realms of possibility and experience?
IT’S ALMOST LIKE MY ART IS A SLIVER, A HINT, OF WHAT NATURE IS DOING ALREADY, WHICH IS ARRANGING CERTAIN FORMS TO MAKE MORE COMPLEX FORMS. THAT’S HOW THINGS ARE BUILT.
THIS CAN BE THE PIECE ITSELF,”
HE REALIZED OF THE GRID TAPE.
“IT DOESN’T SOLELY HAVE TO BE IN THE BACKGROUND.”
“How is this going to be experienced? That’s the main thing I’m thinking about when making a piece,” Carey said. He hopes that viewers encounter his art and are changed, even in a small way. Perhaps they
learn the fallibility—untrustworthiness?—of their senses. Or perhaps they recognize the expansiveness of the material world. A series of lines, Carey’s art hypothesizes, can contain multitudes. In simplicity, complication is born.
“I’m always thinking about the big picture,” Carey said. “I don’t plan where each line is going to go, but I have a big-picture idea of how things are going to be and how the beholder is going to experience it. Everything in between works itself out.”
Before Carey places that first line, he meditates. He looks at the space deeply, critically, and stares, letting the room and the light wash over him. Then he places that first line, and the rest of the piece explodes almost organically from it.
Carey does not plan his works. He has an idea of where they will go and what they will achieve, but the foresight stops there. In his art, Carey is attempting to achieve a sense of spontaneity and organicism, where one thing builds on another builds on another builds on another. Evolution, you could say, is his inspiration.
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin writes,
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
In this passage, Darwin discusses what we’ll call an elemental view of life; from the most basic forms, “grandeur” arises. That is, in so many words, evolution at work.
“It’s almost like my art is a sliver—a hint—of what nature is doing already, which is arranging certain forms to make more complex forms,” Carey said. “That’s how things are built; it starts with atoms and molecules and cells. We’re a collection of simple things that come together to make something greater than the whole of their parts.”
Carey has experienced a fascinating evolution of his own. He was born in Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island and grew up in Southern California. His family did not encourage him to become an artist. “My family’s a pretty traditional Asian family, where art isn’t seen as something that’s viable as a career,” Carey said. “I just never thought of it as an option.” As a teenager, he attended car races in Ontario, California. The simple act of spectatorship would change the trajectory of his life. Carey unknowingly (!) received moving violations just for attending the races. He was nineteen when a cop pulled him over and told him he was driving on a suspended license.
“The military was really my only option at that point,” Carey said. “I was having to rely on people to take me places. The military offered a guaranteed job [that didn’t require a license].” Carey became a language analyst in the U.S. Air Force. He studied Russian for his first term, and Mandarin for his second. Much of his work in the military remains confidential. “For me, the military is a collection of experiences,” he said. “You meet all these people from different parts of the U.S., you travel… It gave me some perspective into how the world works.”
Around 2012, Carey had what amounts to an earth-shattering experience, something like what Oprah might have called an “aha” moment. After high school, Carey had had a friend who was getting into tattooing. Like Carey, his friend liked to draw. “I shadowed her while she was tattooing and dabbled in that for a bit,” Carey said. But his path diverged from his friend’s. He moved to San Diego and begin realizing his only realistic career option was diving headfirst into the military.
I DON’T PLAN WHERE EACH LINE IS GOING TO GO, BUT I HAVE A BIG-PICTURE IDEA OF HOW THINGS ARE GOING TO BE AND HOW THE BEHOLDER IS GOING TO EXPERIENCE IT…”
Around 2007, Carey turned on the television and saw a curious commercial about a tattoo shop. The show starred Carey’s aforementioned friend. Her name was Kat Von D. “To me, she was just Kathy,” Carey said. “I hadn’t seen her in years, and here she is all of a sudden, an uber-famous TV star.”
Carey describes encountering the commercial as a shock. “Ultimately, it made me think about my own life,” Carey said. “[Kat Von D] and I were in similar situations; we both liked to draw and had some talent. The difference was, she continued with her artistry, and I got a career. Seeing her successful at what she was passionate about triggered something. It told me it was possible. It told me: Maybe I should try something with my art.”
“I never saw [art] as something I could or should do,” Carey added.
Within a few years, Carey had left the military and enrolled full-time at the Otis College of Art and Design. “At this point, I was already in my late-twenties and all the advice I got was so against the idea of what I wanted to do,” Carey said. “The only person who was fully supportive of me was my wife.”
Ultimately, Carey had to ask himself: “If I don’t try this will I regret it?” The answer was a resounding yes. “I’d rather have tried it and failed than not tried it at all,” Carey said.
At art school, Carey realized he “had no idea what I was getting into.” He studied fine art as a way to explore the field as a generalist. “It wasn’t really about trying to find a job,” Carey said. “I didn’t have a definitive path of what I wanted to do. For me, it was a time of discovery.” Something fateful happened at Otis. Each year, the seniors put on a group show, for which they’d commandeer the campus gallery. That year the show was called On the Grid. “The idea was to grid the space and the eight of us would put our work in the grid,” Carey said. “I ended up doing the vast majority of the taping of the grid.” Carey slowly realized that “tape is a fine medium.” For most artists, masking tape is just a part of the process, one that the artist removes after the work is finished. For Carey, the medium of tape contained the message. “Maybe this can be the piece itself,” he realized of the grid tape. “It doesn’t solely have to be in the background.”
By the time the senior show rolled around, Carey had combined the immersive tape installation with his line drawings to create a volumetric, topographic space that made his tape cubes appear that they were floating away from the wall. “The more I did, my art started to morph into something else, something beyond vantage point art,” Carey said. “I went more into the process of arranging lines together. That’s kind of where my art is now.”
Carey sees tape as his “weapon of choice.” Tape lines, and the optical art they create, have unarguably become his signature style. “I consider this success,” he said. “Even if I never get another job, the whole attempt, the experiment, has already been worth it. It’s already fulfilled my curiosity and hopes. Of course, I have ambitions and want to do more. But if I stopped right now and never did another piece, I’d have a sense of satisfaction that I did what I did.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 66. The issue is sold out but you subscribe today for our latest issue here. Your subscriptions support our independent art publication. Thanks!
