About

Bio

Carolyn Kay was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1967. Her mother gave up a beloved career as a lab technician to become a full-time mother to 6 children. Carolyn is the oldest sibling. Her father, a professional gambler, moved the family to Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1974, during the height of the mafia violence. The drama of that time and environment left an indelible influence on Carolyn, and she couldn’t wait to leave Las Vegas upon high school graduation to attend college in Southern California. Because her parents strongly opposed her artistic dreams, Carolyn ended up majoring in economics and accounting, and snuck in a minor in art. Since then, her finance-related career has focused on roles at nonprofit organizations, including art museums in California, New York, and Arizona, while she continues to develop as an artist. In 2001, Carolyn earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Claremont Graduate University. During graduate school, her early figurative painting evolved into conceptual site-specific works that incorporated fiscal themes across various media, launching an emerging art career in Los Angeles and continuing in New York. Relocating from New York City to Arizona in 2013, she put her art practice on hiatus following some personal traumatic events. While completing a Master of Science in Accounting in 2024, Carolyn recommitted to a studio practice as a resident artist in the Artist & Makers Studios in Oro Valley, focusing on acrylic painting and resuming the fiscal and gambling themes of her early work.

Artist’s Statement

My drawings, paintings, photographs, installations, assemblages, sculptures, and videos explore the viewer's interactions with images of money, accounting, numbers, and gambling. My experience of growing up in Las Vegas, as a financial professional, and my everyday encounters with money, are the source material for a body of work that explores perceptions and expectations of value, including the parallels between the value systems of art and money. My intent is for the viewer to engage with the aesthetic calculations at the intersection of their own monetary traditions, emotions, and lived experiences.

I am currently painting abstract narratives and conceptual portraits using number stamps to explore themes of money and gambling. My compositions of messy, misaligned, and painterly hand-stamped numbers confront and unravel hierarchies, rules, and order, portraying subtle narratives of economic ecosystems. I use shifting and mutating numeric cyphers, symbols, and positional notation to engage viewers’ expectations of value, creating aesthetic calculations that intersect with traditions, perceptions, emotions, and lived experience. My personal background growing up in Las Vegas as the daughter of a professional gambler, and working as an accountant in the museums and nonprofits in California, New York, and Arizona, all inform the riddle and flow of my paintings.