Kala Wozniak

How about some traveling art. Discovered this artist via poppytalk and thought it might offer you some inspiration as your prepare for your trip. Enjoy!


I think these paintings are interesting in thier incompleteness. You get a sense of the hurry of travel, yet the logos and names of businesses stick clearly in your mind through familiarity and repetiton. Much like the feeling of roadtrips, specific details are a blur as they speed by on the highway, but we remember the places we slept and the unusual juxtaposition of signs and locations and hotels and churches. It is interesting how suddenly the appearance of a sign or advertisement--- a visual symbol-- overrrides the complexity of the architecture or landscape. We only remember the bright colors, the graphic lines, the florescent fonts.

The obvious combinations of finished and unfinished, the pairing of graphic, intentional patterns with looser lines grabs your attention. I admire artists who are daring enough to leave things undone. In the case of Wozinak, it is almost like she starts working on an element of the painting and gets to a point where she decides the certain part just doesn't matter anymore and she moves on to add more detail to something more important in her own memory. Her paintings are not exact renderings of each place visited, but more like poems about the things that are most prominent in her mind. The attention that she gives to the subjects in her paintings tell us as viewers something about how she feels about the place and the importance of each element she is speaking about in her paintings.

Her use of multiple drawing media in each piece contributes to the sense of diversion we feel when we travel. There are so many elements and just one, unified, concise material wouldn't have the same mood. Do you see how the variety of textures, colors, and effects of the different media contributes to the collection of signs and landscape elements that Wozniak is talking about here?

this is what the artist has to say about it:

I make paintings about how the American landscape looks today. The places I depict in these works are specific yet general: the sprawl of a spring break beach town, a view of a strip as seen from the car, the architecture of a highway rest stop.

These paintings are at once fabrications, conflations and literal depictions, records of the places I've traveled to and through. They are also about painting itself- about speed, slowness, touch, spatial expanse and compression. Of equal importance is what isn’t depicted- disappearing vernacular and natural landscapes. The complexity of these works arises from competing impulses- a love of exploration tempered by a measured, almost anthropological realism. This duality is further complicated by my intuitive approach to making.

Although my work often depicts standardized and mundane spaces, it has a quirky, handmade quality, and thus highlights localism and an individual's unique relationship to landscape.

leave a comment about what you think of the work. Do you like it? Why or why not? How do you interpret what Wozniak is saying in her work? What do you think it is about?