Karla Wozniak
Sunshower

July 26 - September 7, 2024
Reception: Friday, July 26, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Karla Wozniak’s new paintings are filled with a playful complexity. The paintings exist on the edge of representation: a line becomes a string, a net, a contour, a sound wave, moving from a single gesture to carefully sculpted paint rising from the surface of the canvas. Color is formal and representative, and symbols and marks interweave to create a visual world that suggests a kind of synesthetic experience. Like the phenomenon of a sunshower, in which rain falls when the sun is shining, the work presents viewers with a superabundance of material that is at once contradictory and harmonic.

The work in this exhibition marks a shift towards abstraction in Wozniak’s practice, which previously explored aspects of the American landscape and spaces of childhood. These themes are still present but more indirectly so. Also included in the show are graphite drawings, which have become a nightly practice for the artist, who turned to drawing during the early days of Covid as a way to work quickly and intuitively. Most of the recent paintings take specific drawings as their starting points. 

Star Map, the largest painting in the show, operates as a kind of guide to navigating the work, offering a system of visual translation by highlighting overlapping and contradictory reads. In this painting you are looking down at the earth and up at a vast night sky indicated by lines and color and interrupted by marks that evoke sound waves, heat, and pressure. Flipping between macro and micro, these lines morph from constellations to string pinned up on a bulletin board. The painting surface feels physical and topographical: layered and built-up in some areas, scumbled and untouched in others.

Like Star Map, the other works in the show are anchored by a linear structure. We see lines echo and cross, creating pockets of visual experiences. Some pockets are porous and gauzy, others layered with dense paint and built-up topography, and still others filled with atomized brushstrokes. The precarious formal structure of these paintings leads to sensations of compression and intensity, and a sense of shifting of light, weather, and the ground beneath our feet. The paintings are as tactile as they are visual; emotive as they are cerebral.  

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Karla Wozniak is a Bay Area-based artist. Wozniak received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has shown internationally, with solo shows at such venues as the Schneider Museum in Ashland, Oregon, and the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco. Wozniak has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and was a SECA Finalist at SFMOMA. She has participated in the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace program; the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program; and received two MacDowell Colony fellowships. Her work has been featured in a number of publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Village Voice, and The Huffington Post, among others. Her work is included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Knoxville Museum of Art permanent collections. Wozniak is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts.