Join us for a reception an artist talk, Thursday, February 16 at the Gallery at Whiskey Row Lofts, 131 W. Main St., Louisville. Free and Open to the Public.

Reception 6:00, Artist talk 7:00. Contact Skylar Smith for more information, 502-618-4600.

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:

gregorylindgallery.com

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.