Joyce Kozloff: BOYS’ ART and other works
November 5 - December 6, 2003
Joyce Kozloff’s Boys’ Art is a series of twenty four collaged drawings based on maps, diagrams and illustrations of historic battles. Kozloff has peopled these highly detailed “military stage sets” with a variety of fighting figures, ranging from her son Nikolas’s childhood comic-book superheros to warriors borrowed from Goya, da Vinci, Picasso, Hokusai, the Plains Indians, Henry Darger, and many others. The exhibition coincides with the release of an oversized artist’s book of these works published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. in a hardcover, linen bound volume. An additional 55 copies include a signed, limited edition hand colored and collaged etching.
In his introductory essay to the book, artist Robert Kushner delves into this body of work, “Over the last several decades, the Women's Movement has instructed us to examine and consider well the glass ceilings imposed by ‘girls' games’ -- nurse instead of doctor, secretary rather than the boss, homemaker to the breadwinner...But we rarely care to consider the terrible aspects of the games boys are rewarded for playing -- codified celebrations of violence and destruction.
Among the other works in this exhibition, Kozloff will be showing two very large (8’ x 16’) multi-paneled paintings: Spheres of Influence and Dark and Light Continents. Each is shaped like the twelve adjacent gores of a globe; in fact she refers to them as her celestial and terrestrial globes.
Spheres of Influence contains maps of the most heavily populated areas around the Mediterranean Sea during Greco-Roman times, based on an atlas of the ancient world. It is painted in sun-drenched, dreamy colors, but overlaid in harsher tones with symbols from United States government tactical pilotage charts of the same, still contested zones. This contemporary intrusion belies the work’s tranquillity and proposes America as the new Rome.
Dark and Light Continents is based on a satellite photograph of earth at night. Kozloff was fascinated by the unequal distribution of light across its surface, where the northern hemispheres sparkled, and the southern hemispheres languished in darkness. The near grisaille, moody artwork captures the movement of clouds across the land, while a second layer of stars, collaged into constellations from a seventeenth century celestial chart, forms a scrim over the continents.
Rocking the Cradle is a wooden cradle (too big for a baby but not big enough for an adult) that will sit -- and rock -- on the floor of the gallery. The interior is painted with an antique map of Mesopotamia, which evokes the metaphor “cradle of civilization.” Over that topographical surface, there are diagrams of allied troops encircling Baghdad in the spring of 2003 (as they were represented daily during that period in The New York Times).
