Tiffany Bozic: Spectrum

Joshua Liner Gallery presents Spectrum, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Tiffany Bozic. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring 12 new works of acrylic on maple panel. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception on Thursday, November 16, 2017.

Bozic’s work addresses the deep connections between ourselves and the natural world, focusing here on the vast array of emotions we all share. Her compositions encourage universal understandings, as she uses her work to explore experiences shared between all who inhabit the earth. The title for this new body of work, Spectrum, stresses this breadth of emotional connections, explaining that her work is a celebration of these possibilities.

The subjects and inspirations that drive Bozic’s compositions are taken from her own personal experiences and surroundings. Most of the featured elements for this body of work come from either the Redwood Forest that surrounds her California home, or from her own field experience from countries as far off as Papua New Guinea and the Galapagos. Generally casting animals as the stars in her paintings, the artist searches for universal struggles, emotions, questions, depicted through allegorical metaphor. In Boundaries, we see oversized insects crawling in from the darker edges of the piece, exposing their vulnerable side. For the artist, the piece offers a parallel for facing and overcoming one’s fears. Her works contain multiple fictional and surreal threads, with visual elements chosen for both narrative and emotional resonance.

Using these personal, natural subjects, the artist combines these elements to convey her own events, while connecting to natural history and its patterns. Works like Anxietyexemplify this combination of metaphorical and natural narratives. The composition of spiraling ants here exudes a psychoanalytic nervousness, even before we understand that this spiral is a death march for the ants. This “spiral of death” is an occurrence in nature when ants (after losing their pheromone trail) get caught in a perpetual circle heading nowhere, marching indefinitely.

Bozic twists together multiple understandings of the world and our relationship to it. The artist explains: There is a natural history narrative that I am exploring: Where and how the various species evolve and how do they interact with each other in their environment? What are their shared desires? And on another level, how are we humans emotionally affected by these creatures that we have evolved with and how does this relationship continually shape the way that we define who we are in the natural world?

For this latest body of work, Bozic explores this relationship, and reminds us of the fragility of our world, which is continually in a persistent flux. Between natural evolution, and that which we bring upon ourselves, we all share the changes in our environment, adding to our shared experiences. Bozic is fascinated with our role as the dominant species, and in how we understand and take responsibility for our place in this world. As the artist states: What we do to our environment ultimately we do to ourselves, a sentiment directly illustrated in her painting Rising, a comment on our rising oceans in the Pacific Northwest.

Born in 1979 in Arkansas, Tiffany Bozic currently lives and works in Larkspur, CA. Bozic was the first artist in residence at the California Academy of Sciences and her work is held in numerous public and private collections, most notably by the U.S. Department of State’s U.S. Embassy, Mbabane, Swaziland. Bozic has given numerous lectures about her work including Apple’s Start Something New campaign (2016); Semi-Permanent Art and Design conference (2014, 2013, 2007), and at the California Academy of Sciences (2007). Selected solo exhibitions include The Animal In Us(2016); Qualia (2014); Transformation (2012), and Confiding in Strangers (2010), all at Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY, Sense of Wonder, FFDG, San Francisco, CA, (2013); and Bedtime Stories, Kinsey/DesForges Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2008). Selected group exhibitions include Turn the Page, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA: travelled to Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Re-presenting Representation, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY (2014); and Outlandish: Contemporary Depictions of Nature, Walnut Creek, CA (2012).