July 3, 2013
Karla Wozniak at Gregory Lind Gallery
Every time we see Karla Wozniak’s work, it is always a pleasure, and we are always excited to see each new body of work she produces. This current show at Gregory Lind Gallery, The Weather is Cosmic (running until July 20th), features oil paintings and works on paper inspired by her new surroundings in east Tennessee where she has now lived since 2011 depicting careful observation of the landscape and a Wozniak’s emotional response. Here’s some more from Gregory Lind’s press:
“Here, highways cut through a beautiful and ferocious natural world and strip malls collide with the verdant overgrowth so specific to the region. We can retrace Wozniak’s intuitive process on the surfaces of these works, with one decision leading to another and then another through quick reaction and obsessive revision. The result is a series of unstable images that both reveal their history and exist in the present.
Abstraction helps to build these pictures—marks double as recognizable imagery and unknowable forms. The surfaces of these paintings have a molded, carved quality while other areas are transparent or rubbed away, echoing the changes to the landscape that occur over time. For example, in “Pilot, East Tennessee” (2012), a thick topographic ridge gives way to calligraphic foliage and the thin wispy atmosphere of the underpainting. In this world, everything is amplified and everyday views become strange; light feels as substantial as a mountain or a telephone pole, as though the bright, illuminated world of the city and its commercial strips have infused the landscape with alien forms. And in the end, east Tennessee comes alive—the foliage is growing, the mountains are moving, and the ground shifts beneath our feet.”