Karla Wozniak’s recent paintings and drawings explore the ways in which her experience of place has been altered by the pandemic and recent California wildfires. They reflect a new reality where work and school collide in the previously personal spaces of our homes. The paintings spring from an intuitive drawing practice, in which the artist makes nightly recordings of memory fragments and a personal symbology. Wozniak’s earlier works are inspired by the suburban and rural American landscape, and explode with exuberant color and complex forms. These works move between representation and a self-generated abstraction, forming a tapestry of obsessive patterning and tactile surfaces.
Karla Wozniak is a Bay Area-based artist. Her work has been exhibited at the Schneider Museum, Ashland, Oregon; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Colburn Gallery, University of Vermont; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; and Artists Space, New York, among other venues; She is the recipient of two MacDowell Colony fellowships and participated in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program and Bronx Museum, Artist in the Marketplace program. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Knoxville Museum of Art and has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Village Voice, and The Huffington Post, among others. Wozniak is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale School of Art.