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.
