Todd Carpenter's Niches of the Mind: Opening Reception Saturday, February 8th 5-8pm

Todd Carpenter returns for his fifth solo exhibition with LAUNCH Gallery since 2010, continuing his deep exploration of our landscapes and humanity’s place in it. While Todd’s paintings, in either urban or wilderness settings, radiate the positive energy of a healthy and inhabited environment, they never include creatures of any kind. Thanks to our advanced conscious and subconscious minds, we are able to interpret the black, white and gray scale imagery as a colorful, robust and lively vista.

My paintings attempt to capture this unconscious connection between humans and places. In particular, I focus on the features that are most effective at conveying the feel of a landscape, and to this end I break scenes down, dissecting them to find the essential organs that give life to land. The subjects become simplified, reduced to the factors that appeal to our genes, as I search for the features that are most intriguing. I concentrate on characteristics such as the subtle shadings of light, the fragments of perspective we don’t consciously see, or the angle of the lines under our feet, as I strive to paint distillations of light and atmosphere, and condensates of shadow, awe, and fear.

Light itself is often the principle subject of my paintings, for frequently it is light that tells us about the dimensionality of a place, while at the same time light is what makes a scene evocative, infusing even the mundane with feeling. It imparts places with atmosphere and intrigue, watering the seeds of our memory with vagaries of shadow that imbue a view with mystery.

My paintings thus examine our attachment to our surroundings, attempting to capture the ability of landscapes to evoke something in our sense of being. They are about place: not particular places, but the more generic idea of place, the place in our ancient past that our minds are searching for. I am trying to depict our niche, our sense of the world as it relates to our sense of self, the unconscious link between the mind and the environment. These are the brains hidden scenes, forgotten by us but remembered in our genes.

Todd Carpenter uses black and white paint to examine the capacity of landscape paintings to convey the sense of places. He holds a MS in Neuroscience and a BS in Psychobiology, and brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, probing the relationships between humans and our environment by examining concepts such as how the depiction of light can impart realism and mood. Before becoming a full-time artist Carpenter worked in the sciences, and in the past has taught neuroscience, environmental science, and photography. He currently teaches painting through the community education program at Santa Monica College. He is based in southern California.