Visiting Artist Program
The Mission of the Visiting Artist Program is to educate and foster a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through public discourse, lectures, performances, exhibitions, and other art-related programs designed for the Louisville community and beyond. The Visiting Artist program presents visiting professional artists who have a demonstrated record of excellence and a commitment to working with students and communities.
Upcoming Visiting Artist, Karla Wozniak, February 16-18, 2012.
Karla Wozniak’s work depicts an American landscape defined by automotive culture and the social ramifications of suburban sprawl. Her paintings, inspired by road trips, depict places ranging from beach town strips in Florida to towns and suburbs in New Jersey, to big cities like Los Angeles, where buildings and brand names vie for space alongside the vanishing natural landscape.
Karla Wozniak (b. 1978 in Berkeley, CA), received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her recent exhibitions include two solo exhibitions at the Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2011, 2008), and the Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH (2010). Recent group exhibitions include Bronx Calling, Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY (2011); Weasel, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2010); and Rhyme, Not Reason, curated by John Yau, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2010).
Wozniak’s distinctions include a NYFA fellowship (2011), participation in the Artist in the Market Place, Bronx Museum (2011), a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Grant (2009-10), two MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2005, 2007). Her work has been noted in a number of publications, including the The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice, among others. Wozniak is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
“My recent paintings and works on paper are based on places I visit around the United States. The spaces I depict are typically in transition. One may pass by them, barely registering their existence beyond the barrage of advertising that floods one’s vision. I am fascinated by these in-between spaces, their architecture, strange juxtapositions, ironies, ugliness, and beauty.
My paintings are part documentary and part authored and imagined. When I travel I take hundreds of digital photos to use as a reference. From these I cull images for specific works. Each painting represents many different views, all taken from a certain geographic area. In this recent work there are also less representational passages that play with color, shape, and compositional and textural relationships. These abstract moments often teeter on the edge of representation, and evoke surfaces, graphic advertising, lighting, weather, and time of day. The complex compositions are meant to organize and synthesize disparate modes of depiction.
Taking visual information from landscape as a jumping-off point, the paintings become personal and almost hallucinatory reinventions of a certain highway strip, rest stop, or Main Street, rendering these mundane drive-by places specific and memorable.”
-Karla Wozniak
To read a recent review of Ms. Wozniak’s work in The San Francisco Chronicle, please visit:
http://gregorylindgallery.com/news/reviews/sfchronicle_wozniak_0611.html
For more information on Ms. Wozniak, please visit:
karlawozniak.com
Public Events:
Public Reception and Artist Lecture, Thursday, February 16, 6:00pm, Whiskey Row Lofts, 131 West Main Street. Free and open to the public.
6pm – 7pm Reception: Food, Drinks, Live Music, and Kentucky School of Art Student Art Exhibit
7pm – 8pm Artist Lecture: “Location and Abstraction”
In this lecture, Karla Wozniak will discuss the way that artists have used abstraction to represent the American landscape. She will discuss her own paintings, which are based on imagery culled from urban and suburban environments, then combined with specific, painterly abstract elements. The talk will also touch on a variety of other artists whose work employs abstraction—both in terms of style and process—to help represent specifics of place.
For inquiry, please contact: Skylar Smith, skylar.smith4@gmail.com, 502.618.4600
History of the Program The Visiting Artist Program (VAP) was established November 2009. To date, VAP has hosted public presentations by nationally and internationally recognized artists working in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation art, and performance. VAP public programs have included lectures, workshops, performances, and artist critiques. These events were produced in conjunction with local art organizations including 21c Museum, The Speed Art Museum, The Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, and Skull Alley.
Past Visiting Artists
November 2009: Dan Dutton, Somerset, KY.
February 2010: William Bailey, New Haven, CT.
April 2010: Barry Nemett, Baltimore, MD.
May 2010: Judy Pfaff, New York, NY.
January 2011: Beverly Fishman, Baltimore, MD.
Selection procedure A jury, composed of local and national artists, art educators, and curators, will select visiting artists from applicants, as well as artists proposed by the KSA National Advisory Board.
Funding The Visiting Artist Program is funded by private donors, grants and other public funding vehicles as they become available.