Meet the Artist

 Candice Carnes is a fourth-generation New Mexican multimedia artist. Her work is influenced by her childhood in the South Valley of Albuquerque where she grew up selling her artwork as young as the age of five.

Her primary mediums are acrylic paint, clay, found objects and miniature scale, but she also works in a wide range of crafts. Often her paintings incorporate elements of relief and sculpture, including traditional forms such as paint mediums and textile, and non-traditional forms such as clay. Likewise, some of her sculpture work is as elaborately painted as her canvas work. By incorporating found objects, which carry their own inherent stories, she creates new narratives from the ordinary or sometimes brings new life to the extraordinary.

Many of her themes are influenced by day of the dead, vintage story books, circus/freak show themes, fantasy, imagination, and cabinets of curiosities which became early museums and private collections of science, art and travel. She favors the strange, the different, and the unusual, even the dark and the occult. As an outcast, she aims to make welcoming spaces for people who find it hard to fit in. 

Her specialty is to shock and push the boundaries of comfort while typically occupying spaces that require a family friendly approach. She believes it is important to challenge people in this way and force them to think. Her art is primarily displayed at her (and her partner, Zack’s) store: The Shop of Infinite Possibilities located at Rio West Mall in Gallup, New Mexico.

She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to her art, having a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Goddard College, a Master of Arts in science writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University. She has won a few humble awards in both writing and art in the past, but the Albuquerque store had taken up a lot of her time over the past 5 years. She is excited to be more fully emersed in the creative world again.