dim_sum_parlor, 2010
Collage, acrylic, pencil on paper, with digital print
12" x 17"
L'Amérique du Nord, 2012
Acrylic, collage, and digital archival inkject print
36.25" x 31.75"
(Photo credit: Kevin Noble)
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Past Exhibition
Other Geographies
Curated by Deborah Irmas
January 13 – February 17, 2013
Book Signing: Sunday, January 13, 4 p.m.
Artist Reception: Sunday, January 13, 5 – 7 p.m.
Artist Walkthrough & Closing Reception: Sunday, February 17, 4 p.m.
CB1 Gallery is pleased to present Joyce Kozloff’s Other Geographies, an exhibition of works on paper made during the last three years. Other Geographies consists of two recent bodies of work: China is Near (2010) and Social Studies (2012). Other Geographies, Kozloff’s first one person exhibition in Los Angeles in more than 20 years, will be presented by CB1 Gallery from January 13 to February 17, 2013.
Joyce Kozloff’s practice of incorporating decorative elements from Non-Western visual culture into paintings, drawings, prints, collages, ceramics, sculpture and public art is both a creative and political act. As a feminist and founding member of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, her early work critiqued the contemporary canon and theories that privileged European/American high art superior. More recently her work explores larger geopolitical issues: wars, colonization, global trade, as well as religious iconography. For the past two decades, she has integrated historical and contemporary maps into her work to speak directly to a sense of place and/or time. By layering imagery, via re-drawing and collaging, copying and Photoshopping, Kozloff continues this ongoing research.
China is Near (the title appropriated from a 1967 film by Marco Bellocchio, La Cinà e Vicina) was inspired by a much-anticipated voyage along the Silk Road that was postponed. Instead of going to the Far East, Kozloff printed Google maps of “Chinas” around the world as backdrops for a series of collage/drawings. These were then overlaid with decorative papers and kitschy tissue paper cutouts (babies, warriors, zodiacal animals), a traditional Chinese art. The “missed” China was replaced with Chinatown, especially the one nearby her home in lower Manhattan, New York City. Using a camera for the first time, she constructed a series of photographic storefront still lives which were paired with the collages and reiterate Kozloff’s unique vision and personal vocabulary, where illusion and reality vie for attention. The entire series, China is Near was published by Edizioni Charta in 2010.
Her most recent work, Social Studies, is based on 1950s maps used for Geography lessons in French elementary schools during the post war period. These didactic, yet charming scholastic “visual aids” imparted a post colonial view of the world to generations of Europeans but Kozloff reveals their meaning through her collagist strategy using everything from drawing to digital manipulation. Cinematic in scale, these vibrant multimedia artworks cover the world from Europe, South America, Asia and Africa, introducing context not taught in History class.
Joyce Kozloff received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1967. Kozloff was a co-founder in both the Pattern and Decoration and the feminist art movement of the 1970s and has been active in the women’s and peace movements throughout her life. Her early paintings and collages draw on colors and designs from Islamic, North African and Southwest American Indian cultures. Kozloff’s interest in decorative arts and “craft” or “ornament” aligned with the feminist movement and provided a stark alternative to the minimalist “high art” being produced mainly by men during this period. Her later large-scale public art commissions incorporate ceramic tile installations, which reflect her continuing interest in color, pattern, and design from other parts of the world. Her politically engaged work has been based on cartography since the early 1990s.
Prints in the "Social Studies" series were produced with printer Fran Flaherty during a residency at the Digital Art Studio, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 2012.
Parts of "China is Near" were produced at the Advanced Media Studio, New York University with the assistance of Morgan R. Levy.
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