Marill finds inspiration in salvaged “visual aides,” originally used in classrooms of the 1950s, which she reproduced and repurposed with gouache and modern influence. Marill’s edits and additions update the 60- year-old teaching tools’ focus on farming and industry, highlighting technological advances and the consequential commercial and environmental issues. The resulting works are an often-humorous guessing game; the viewer is challenged to find contemporary intrusions in the landscapes. Once discovered, Marill’s inclusions cleverly underscore the ways that we react as a society to establish a moral compass as things change. The clashes between past, present and future models for living reveal and question the nature of progress.

Of Marill’s work Allison Arieff writes: What at first seems a bucolic glimpse into agrarian idyll reveals itself to be a mind-boggling mash-up: equal parts pre-industrial arcadia and post-apocalyptic terrain… the essence of Marill’s message: we remain deliberately oblivious in order to survive. But for how much longer will that strategy work?

Carrie Marill was born in 1976 in San Francisco, CA. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 2002 with a BA in painting. She attended Cornell University in 2004, where she received an MFA in painting. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Miami, Texas and Arizona. Marill’s work has been published in New American Paintings, Wired Magazine, Southwest Art, The New Times, LA Weekly and LA Times. Marill has limited-edition prints available on 20×200.