A few days after the opening reception of his 2009 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, artist Carroll Dunham paid a visit to AIR's Clocktower studios to talk about his life and work and notions of the "blindness" of his figures.

Dunham initially gained recognition in the 1980s for his wood veneer paintings, utilizing the limitations and grain of the wood as primary elements of the work, interweaving foreground and background seamlessly and beguilingly. In the 1990s, he gradually allowed for an incorporation of organic forms with human characteristics into his work: variously suggestive and essentialized shapes called to mind "ruder" elements of the body, giving his work a stronger comic, sexual and psychoanalytic thrust than his audiences were used to. His canvases became dynamic spaces of inter-connected, free-form organic chassis, in which implied narratives would form without occluding the peculiar integrity of each individual shape. In the paintings exhibited in his 2009 show at Gladstone, the dominance he had previously placed on the male figure has given way to explorations of the female form, which, with their pronounced croppings and dynamic interplays with the landscape, propel Dunham's pictorial language into a new and exciting phase (1 hour 4 minutes).