Press
The Best Intentions of Tiffany Bozic
Juxtapoz • December 2006 • By Mark Sanford Gross
< back to pressTwenty-seven years old and just five feet, four inches, Tiffany Bozic’s voice could easily be lost in the ruffle of trees or the sound of migrating birds. Not to be fooled by this soft breeze of a personality her carefully chosen words, laughter and invented expressions let you know who she is, but not completely. Her recent solo show at BLK/MRKT Gallery in Culver City, California was LA Weekly’s Pick of the Week. One hundred and fourteen openings vied for that coveted choice. The crowd, a perfect balance to her installation, seemed to be dinner guests. Her work, mostly large images on wood speak to her bewitched visitors as if she is a messenger, not a painter. Each image in their own right, intoxicating and contagious.
On the night of her BLK/MRKT opening, I spent the evening talking to Fred Bozic, from Cleveland, Ohio and Avis Marshall from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, her parents. It was the first art opening for both of them and their first time in Los Angeles. Their words and character made me realize that Tiffany’s gifts come from a place that everyone can feel but no one can explain. It is a struggle figuring which of her parents she is the fallen branch from.
Like everything she does, the place in Oakland that she shares with her fiancé Jack, an evolutionary biologist for the Academy of Sciences is meticulous. It sparkles like her eyes when she talks of her passion. Science books fill the bookcases. Plants are freshly watered. A bowl of flowers sits not quite in the center of the table that we sat at. Almost against a wall of oversized windows, the ambient sounds of a-just-outside-of-San Francisco neighborhood surrounded us if we were a building in the middle of a toy train set.
Tiffany invited me into the place where she lives. Where few people can visit. Where she goes to and comes from. Where she gets inspired. Where she gives life to the world in her head. Where she trusts. It is her palette. It was here in this place within a place that we spoke. Her work, still at BLK/MRKT, is technical and labor-intensive but this is not what Tiffany attributes her success to. This interview is unconventional. To focus only on the specifics of her work would make her uncomfortable. To me, it would be disrespectful. Like her passion for music, Tiffany Bozic’s work is a symphony that is listened to.
Mark: Your mom said she’d use purples and reds to paint you. Your dad said he’d use greens. Why?
Tiffany: My parents each see me very differently. My mother has a deep power, and I owe much of what I understand about these things to her. So, for her to see blood and red that’s just because she can actually see that, if you know what I mean. My dad picked sea green because that’s always been my favorite color. I’m drawn to it and will cross the block just to see the color.
Mark: So your mom sees your soul in your paintings?
Tiffany: Yeah. But also she sees what she understands about herself. It’s a mirror.
Mark: And your dad, he sees the aesthetic?
Tiffany: He does not look at my work as just ‘pretty’. He sees the soul in it.
Mark: Lets explore the technicality and the aesthetic from a different point of view. What is the process that brings your work from the soul to the canvas?
Tiffany: It’s a good question and I wish I could answer it really well. I don’t know where it comes from. When I have an emotion or question that I can’t understand, my reaction is to shut the world out. Where the actual images come from, who knows? Where do we get the inspiration to be who we really are?
Mark: When you finish an image, is it a surprise guest to you?
Tiffany: It’s all mapped out in my head beforehand. I might tweak it here and there in the process, but it’s pretty much the same vision.
Mark: You know they say that a writers’ fingers transmit instead of type. Is your brush the same?
Tiffany: To a large part, absolutely. But technically, I have to have a really good idea of what the work is going to look like. I can’t redo these paintings. If I do the wrong part of the painting first, I won’t be able to balance it later. It’s a math formula. A puzzle. I try to figure out a way to integrate the complexities. At a certain point though, after the initial layout I go on a kind of autopilot, which can last for a couple of days, or in some cases can go on for an entire month until the piece is completed.
Mark: Like when you painted Grand Piano, I think it was over Christmas a few years back?
Tiffany: That painting took me two weeks. To eat, and to sleep turns into a burden of sorts, because I can forget about my physical being. So if somebody comes in the room or if the phone rings, anything, the glass shatters.
Mark: What was your most challenging piece of work?
Tiffany: There’s a couple of different ways to answer that. Commissions are extremely difficult for me because I can’t force anything that doesn’t want to come out. If my heart isn’t in it, I cannot see it. An emotionally challenging painting, like “The Best Intentions” came about when I was going through a difficult time in my life. I was questioning “How can I break this down into a visual language that I can understand? How can I become a better person out of this anguish?” And so that image came to me.
Mark: So emotionally, “The Best Intentions” was the hardest?
Tiffany: They all have had their difficulties. I don’t have much interest in trying to work things out that don’t present a challenge. Emotional stability allows me to tap into things like the painting of the sphere of mice, which took an extreme amount of focus and concentration.
Mark: And when you see your paintings now, do they remind you?
Tiffany: At different times you’re going to see something different. It’s like going back to your journal entries.
Mark: Can we talk more specifically about the BLK/MRKT show? Are you happy with the current show?
Tiffany: Yes. Because I was fortunate to have the ability to stow away and work out some new ideas and experiment with some new techniques that I didn’t feel capable of accomplishing a year ago. So first off, I challenged myself. My parents came to this show, as well as many of my wonderful friends. Also, My friend Francisco Robles, a woodworking wizard, helped me out by building all the frames. Both my father and best friend Garett Zunt helped me hang the show. In addition to that, Jana and Dave at BLK MRKT continued to be wonderful to work with. Billy O’Callaghan helped with the photography before and came down to photograph the installation. It was a spoiled rotten position to be in really.
Mark: Did you learn from this show? Give me an example.
Tiffany: Oh, yes. Before this, I didn’t know how to make a sphere for example out of entwined flowers. So, I’m trying to expand my knowledge about perspective and dimension. I also feel I am getting a little more comfortable with what I call ‘Complex Simplicity’. As well as the actual process of staining layers after layers of intertwined elements individually like I did in the vines leading through the Cassowary skull in the “In the Beginning” painting.
Mark: My boyfriend is fascinated with your spheres-both the mice and flower balls. Are they related?
Tiffany: Yes, they are related; Maybe 1st cousins or something.
Mark: Tell me about the masks. You gave some of them teeth but none of them eyes. Why?
Tiffany: I don’t think they should have eyes. At least the masks in my mind don’t. I like them this way.
Mark: You’re mom said she was so happy that people at the opening “got it.” How does it feel when you walk through the room and you hear people using words like “awestricken and captivating.”
Tiffany: I sometimes feel embarrassed, like I shouldn’t hear it, though I am happy that the work speaks some kind of truth to them. I don’t know how to explain this, but that’s one of the greatest joys of showing my work. It has always been a great desire of mine for people to continue to carry the seeds onto something else after seeing my work, and through their own voice they become a part of the cycle of inspiration.
Mark: Painting can be a lonely process?
Tiffany: It can also become the most comforting, unbelievable thing. Sometimes when I am alone, I can feel like this huge waterfall going through me, and I am weightless. I crave it.
Mark: Who speaks to you when you paint?
Tiffany: Who speaks to you when you write? Where does that voice come from? Where does it begin and end? We’ve been trying to figure this thing out for centuries (laughter). I think it is beyond our understanding. It joins the long list of questions we are not capable of knowing the answers to. It comes out in the arts.
Mark: Like answers trying to come out of your images? What do they say?
Tiffany: I can’t break it down into a verbal language. I can only feel it, like a song.
Mark: Speaking of songs. I asked your folks what song would best speak of you?
Tiffany: My dad, he said that “Sunny side of the street” song. Which is strange.
I would probably choose a song like “Strange Fruit”; a sound that plucks all my bass strings down to the deepest darkest channels; it carries on beyond my time and passes through all humanity, ALL the way down to the roots.
Mark: You’re in new physical and emotional place and your unpacking from this hit opening in Los Angeles. What’s your responsibility to yourself?
Tiffany: I feel like I’m drifting in the wind unwinding the truest loves of my life. But I think that I have the stability to focus my intentions on the things that I really care about now more so than ever.
I have a small circle of people that I trust – they give me all the encouragement and understanding that I need to live a humble simple life. So, although it can be incredibly exciting and wonderful if a show goes over ‘well’, I have to feel almost indifferent to ‘outside validations’ and continue to work towards my own personal goals. I try to keep my head down. If my paintings for whatever reason don’t resonate with the public and I run out of physical fuel for the next body of work, then I have to be thankful for the opportunity to try something new. I have learned how to survive on my own. So if I have to come up for air to buss tables for bread, this is ok. I’ll figure it out and continue to stay focused on my work.
Mark: Tiffany, where are you in ten years?
Tiffany: Hell, if I know... if I’m still around I will be living in the moment, wherever that is.
Mark: At the end of this journey, what’s your message?
Tiffany: The way I understand the world is to look through myself first and then to open these little windows up to other people. So we’ll see what happens...
Mark: What about the darker paintings, like “The Barrens of Suburbia?”
Tiffany: It’s a metaphor for a lot of things. Tying words to it would skew perspectives; it is disgraceful to the painting, and I don’t want to have the power to tell people what to think and feel. The moment I do that is the moment I kill the seed of my true intentions and trust in the natural evolution of things.
Mark: Do your paintings protect you?
Tiffany: I’ll put it this way; I believe anyone who locks them selves away to focus on something; strange shit is liable to cross you; and your sense of reality shifts. Technical virtuosity in whatever medium to push this out into the physical world or not – I feel this channel will protect you; If you believe in it and trust your intuition.
Mark: Talk to me about two very specific thresholds in your life. First, when you left the Bay Area for Ohio in 2002. Second, your recent trip to Papua New Guinea. People say that your work reached new levels when you returned.
Tiffany: I like to imagine that I am a scientist, experimenting with myself. I was living in chaos in my early twenties, meeting all of these people, experimenting quite a bit and at some point said, okay, I got my data. I’ve got to go into the lab and see what comes out. And, there were all of these images in my head and I did not have time, or know how to produce them. I knew I had to isolate myself. The hardest thing to do was to go back to what I ran away from. I left home at seventeen and I was always running away from the person that ran away. So I went back to Ohio and started from scratch with my new levels of understanding. Besides, I had this safe haven of the things I could discover in my mind. And I had the 111 Minna solo show to prepare for. That was motivation.
Mark: And New Guinea?
Tiffany: Now that I had all these experiences, I started thinking less in terms of small circles and more on a global sense. How do we relate to nature? The way we structure our societies. Where does this place of feeling separate and break apart from all other living things that exist? It wasn’t like I had this epiphany that I had to go there specifically. You can’t just wake up one day and say, “Hell, I’ll just go to Papua New Guinea.” It is a VERY dangerous place, especially for a woman. So my interest led me to follow my friend Jack into the bush to live with the land and the indigenous people of Herowana to study poisonous birds for six weeks. It was an incredible honor on many levels to be kind of “shown” this entirely different world, to see how man coexists in nature, in a very basic, raw way. I will always be in debt to him for this.
Mark: Again, to me an interview is not about how big is the canvas, why use this set of colors, how’d you get that shape? Does it really matter?
Tiffany: I couldn’t speak to those questions anyway. Should a writer have to talk about the typewriter he uses or do we need Dolly Parton to explain her vibrato? Technically, I know people are drawn to it in my work but it happened almost as a side effect. It’s a natural growth cycle that I am constantly trying to master.
Mark: When I saw your mom in LA, I knew she was nervous and anxious, a little out of place. At the end of the night she was a light. You have that light and that is what I want people to know about you.
Tiffany: Don’t you think everyone has a light?
Mark: I do, but I think that people are afraid to say they have it. People can be intimidated by spirituality.
Tiffany: I couldn’t agree with you more; the things we cannot understand intimidate us.
Like I’m reading this book about an autistic woman and animals...
Mark: “Animals in Translation,” by Temple Grandin?
Tiffany: Yeah. I’m on the edge about some of her viewpoints, but she is very creative. She sees from the animal’s eyes. For anyone to have a perspective of any living thing they have to get down on their knees and see what they are seeing, feel what they’re feeling. Its like with my work; if I feel I need to understand what it means to be ‘objectified’- though I may not feel it is in my character, I am going to go to all lengths to understand this, even if it means I subject myself to it. If I want to see through the eyes of a child in PNG, in Europe, in New York, then I need to travel to these places and get down and push toys around in the mud with them – listen to them. I want to find these common threads; these similarities and differences; and turn over the stones that show me beauty and innocence in the struggles that I feel we all endure.
Mark: Ohio. New Guinea. What’s your next place?
Tiffany: I didn’t plan Ohio when I went back there and I didn’t plan New Guinea. I just roll with it. There is talk about going to Namibia in a couple of months.
Mark: The last question is the same last question I asked your parents. If they could stand at the end of the room at the BLK/MRKT with a microphone what would they say?
Tiffany: My mom said “This is just the beginning” and my dad said “You’d never know how proud of you I am until you’re my age”.
Tiffany: “Thank you. I love you.”
(Note: Thanks to Fred Bozic and Avis Marshall. Their references are extracted from an unpublished interview at BLK/MRKT Gallery at her September 9th opening, and thank you, b).
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