The Other Side of Paradise

Caroompas was born in Oregon and raised in Newport Beach, California. In 1971 she graduated with an MFA from University of South California. She is a musician as well as a visual artist. Interviewed in 2012, she compared her consistent use of sex- and gender-themed ideas to the “element of desire” in rock ‘n’ roll: “the person onstage is a vessel of desire.” Her work “is very much about bringing up questions surrounding relationships past and present, and how culture, and how myth, affects belief systems, of how people orient themselves, in terms of how they deal with relationships and … sexuality, and … issues of the body and gender.” Language is her starting point. Each series begins with a title. “The images are chosen in terms of how the language directs them toward the content.” Typically she will combine several source images in a single work.

Caroompas died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on July 31, 2022 at the age of 76.