New Images - BLK/MRKT Gallery - September-August 2006
For her much-anticipated second exhibition with BLK/MRKT Gallery, Bay Area artist Tiffany Bozic will show new paintings and a mixed-media sculptural installation which further her compelling and established representation of the magical nexus of spirit, nature, myth and art. In the tradition of visionaries like Audubon, Bozic uses a strong sensual line and evocative palette to represent the flora, fauna and animus of a verdant world that both overlaps with and symbolizes the forces at work in the world of humans. “I have always been drawn towards finding some kind of common thread or language that binds us to and separates us from nature and each other.”
The increasingly mature draftsmanship, tenacious curiosity and profound compassion for the expressive forms of nature which define her work have garnered her critical and popular acclaim at a young age, but Bozic still takes every chance she gets to broaden her horizons and increase the range of her influences. The work in this exhibition for example was mainly created during and after her recent extended stay in the wilds of Papua New Guinea accompanying an evolutionary biologist on an ornithological expedition. Though the work is not about that experience in any specific way, her captivation with the exotic ecosystem and startling vibrancy of the living world in which she was immersed manifests itself in the widening of her empty skies, the assertive self-possession of her populations of creatures and botanicals, and what can only be described as a deeper awareness of the organic complexity of a world that goes largely unnoticed.
One painting portrays an incandescent orb of stargazer lilies with gray birds nestled behind the foliage, a vine-embraced oracle as loose as a spider’s web and as dense as tangled hair while another engages a precision of contour, expressive pathos of sinuous crookedness, the subtle touch of magic leant by the addition of pale desiccated animal bones into the inverted oases of her floating ecosystems and above all the flushed ocher, luminous crimson, brassy olive or distressed white of her coloring lend these images the assertive allegorical voice of fairy tales and the heady surrealism of mythology. This work builds on her gift for creating crisp renderings of organic forms that are distilled and illuminated like ancient, early science drawings. In fact, Bozic counts the controversial 19th century evolutionary theorist and visual artist Ernst Haeckel among her most profound influences; he expressed his pro-Darwin views through evocative, precise and sensual renderings of the organic, fractal bodies of newly discovered micro-organisms. However, rather than work in ink or watercolor, Bozic prefers heavier pigments and maple wood panels, whose deeper tones, glimpses of grained surfaces and dimensionality sustain the allegorical, devotional qualities in the imagery.
“Barren of Suburbia” depicts violence within the context of the natural world as a kind of gothic poetry; the shadow to the proverbial light, casting death as a cause for contemplation but not regret or pity. And it also functions as a metaphor for the difficult processes of spiritual awakening, sometimes calling for the devouring of our own most dangerous angels. The monkey’s reflective fleshy wound infuses up through the orange-budded tendrils of a plant curling up to ensnare and fuse with the eagle’s legs, binding them together. Behind them the brown earth slopes down along the horizon toward the surface of a crystal lake in profile so the flat seam of the water meeting the land becomes an intimate equator that divides not only the landscape but the composition of the painting. Without the animals this backdrop could be an abstraction, against which the squaring off of their bodies in the death dance looks both more and less symmetrical. The landscape braces them in their asymmetrical balance. Above them there are stars in the night sky, below them a trail of stargazer lilies in the water. Not since the curiously warm, humid, visceral surrealism of Henri Rousseau have the shadowy threats and divine harmonies of nature been so lovingly represented.
Tiffany Bozic hails from Russellville, Arkansas, and after much seeking, self-educating and adventuring now lives and works in Oakland, CA. Her work has appeared on the covers of
14 Hills and
Flaunt magazines and she is featured in
BLK/MRKT ONE. This is her second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Written by Shana Nys Dambrot
