Karla Wozniak’s recent paintings are knit-together constellations of images and abstract forms grounded in autobiography. The paintings reflect the artist's experience as a parent during the pandemic, and climate anxiety brought on by the recent forest fires and flooding in California. The material process of making the paintings—of adding, adjusting, wiping away—becomes a means of processing these experiences.
A looping line weaves through the work, reading as smoke, yarn, ribbon, and other forms, shifting identity from painting to painting. Themes of childhood and play are ever present, but reverberate with the anxiety of the adult world. Each painting becomes a topographic record built through improvisation, mistakes, and resolution, evoking a sense of time passing, memory, and physical transformation.
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.