KARA JOSLYN

Kara Joslyn’s paintings negotiate gaps between the material world and dream-like impressions, mapping the slippages between earneststorytelling and elusive trickery that constitute our sense of self. Uncanny,humanoid figures imbue voids of black space with a rich, allegorical weight,projecting a sense of symbolic fantasy onto the illusion of real-life objectsand scenes. Joslyn’s characters possess the theatrical mutability of a one person play: the jester, bard, prophet, and traitor are unified in sparse,unfussy gestures. Trickery redeems the tension staged between symbolismand reality, slipping past the trap of binary thinking, propelling the storyforward. In this sense, Jolsyn’s paintings echo a certain narrative sensibilitycaptured by the writer Dodie Bellamy: ‘in the contest of ‘imaginationversus reality,’ I am drawn to ‘versus.’’

Each canvas is an appropriation of sorts, animated by re-modelled and re-made source images. Joslyn does not paint from a place of subjectiveinteriority, but rather projects psychodrama onto mythic symbols andtropes, readapting them to the cultural consciousness of our moment. Atheart, Joslyn’s paintings hack traditional mythology, reworking old standards into surreal, future-oriented webs of subconscious feeling.

In This Is Hardcore, Joslyn gives the figure of the muse a facelift. The muses appear to have been somewhat relegated to the dustbin of arthistory, but they also personify the spirit that possesses us to lose ourselvesto dance, sing, rave or run into a mosh pit. Oft depicted in Renaissancepainting as a group of women with harps and lyres, the muses are alsopowerful dieties. Performing ”‘he cosmic dance of creation anddestruction,’ the Shiva Nataraja, whose monumental statue lives in the entryway of the CERN particle collider, unifies pagan mythology, art and modern physics. In this new series of works, Joslyn imbues the muse withthe kinetic energy of American underground subcultures, blending thesheen of rave culture and the impulse of hardcore punk into a system oftimeless, or out of time, iconography. Each painting exudes a type of sonicambiance, casting out dark, pop-tinged energy.

With This Is Hardcore, Joslyn neither affirms nor denies reality and the myths we construct to make sense of it. Rather, she simply renders slicesof cultural unconscious without judgment, as if to say, ‘it is what it is.’ Working in the vein of American absurdism, subcultural drama, and dreamstate archetypes, Joslyn takes a trickster’s swipe at popular mythology,lending it a sense of redemptive forward motion.

Joslyn sources her imagery from mid-century paper craft books. Taken out of the context of their time, these paper figurines seem absurd–removedfrom their social function as window-dressings, advertisements, and craftprojects for nuclear family home decor. They appear to become strangerelics echoing our reality. Joslyn’s paintings mimic the form of these paperfigurines: both begin as white rectangles, and are then manipulated byhuman hands, given conditional lighting, shape, and recognisable features.How is it, she seems to ask, that certain figures manage to take on anallegorical intensity that is at once in and above their time? Working withcar-paint pigments and airbrushes, Joslyn approaches paint as a type ofmetallic material, not an arrangement of colour. Her unconventional processlends each canvas a holographic feeling, suspending each figure in amiddle ground which is not quite of this world, yet not purely an extensionof individual imagination. Illusion is collapsed onto illusion, creating a densefield of sincerity and visual deception.

Press release courtesy Perrotin. Text: Ryan Mangione.