Crossed Purposes:
Joyce & Max Kozloff Cultural Maps and Urban Streetscapes

September 22 - October 19

Artists Joyce and Max Kozloff share a passion for travel, using images from distant locales as raw material for their tableaux of geographic discovery and cultural displacement. In Crossed Purposes, an exhibition opening at the Mishkin Gallery on September 21, strong correlations in their work can be seen, though the two use radically different techniques to create their art.

Joyce Kozloff is inspired by the "mapping" of cultures. Her collages are a kind of sumptuous archaeology, with layers of decoration and texture affixed to maps and charts of actual continents and oceans. The maps are real but also phantasmagoric, the geography reconstituted and combined with other cultural elements-food, films, textiles--whatever serves her purpose. In works like The French Were Here (Quebec, Port-au-Prince, Fez) and Mekong and Memory she is making a tongue-in-cheek comment on colonialism, while also showing us the syncretism of world art.

Joyce Kozloff was strongly influenced by the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s and its Art Nouveau precursors. She enjoys blurring the boundaries between high art and decorative vernacular art forms, often adding fabrics, sequins, beads and tiles-as well as bits of her own older lithographs and etchings-to her canvases and collages. But though her work is often "a medley of wild appropriations," Kozloff is a deconstructionist at heart. By plucking art from its original context and giving it a new geography, she creates startling juxtapositions, thereby making the familiar exotic and creating layers of meaning that illuminate cultural imperialism, immigration and other important themes.

Max Kozloff, an art critic and photographer, photographs the street scenes and spectacles of urban life around the globe. His camera ranges from Brooklyn's West Indian carnival to the ritual-laden festivals of India. He frequently photographs extravagance and display and is especially drawn to luna parks, pre-Disney entertainment centers found throughout the world. Intensely colorful and full of life, the photos also contain cultural incongruities. Many have a kind of unstable, off-center quality, with some evident dissonance between the setting and the mood of the photograph.

The Crossed Purposes exhibition originated at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. The curator is Robert Kurtz. The exhibition will be at the Mishkin Gallery from Friday, September 22 - Thursday, October 19, 2000. The opening reception is on Thursday, Sept. 21, 5 - 7 pm. Free and open to the public.

The Sidney Mishkin Gallery is located at Baruch College, 135 East 22 Street, New York City.
Gallery hours are:
Monday-Friday, 12 noon-5 p.m.
Thursdays, 12 noon-7 p.m.
Free and Open to the Public.

© 2000 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College

Zane Berzins (news office)
(212) 802-2881
zberzins@newton.baruch.cuny.edu