Kara Joslyn portrait

Kara Joslyn

Everything symbolic is everything real

“If photography is the false index — the truth that tells a lie, I like to think of painting as the trick — the lie that tells the truth.”

Joslyn makes her own paint mixing optical-car-paint-pigments into acrylic base. She approaches paint as a type of metallic material, not an arrangement of colour. Her unconventional process lends each canvas a holographic feeling, suspending each figure in a middle ground which is not quite of this world, yet not purely an extension of individual imagination. Illusion is collapsed onto illusion, c...

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Bio

Kara Joslyn (she/her) was born in San Diego, California. She now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Education

Joslyn received a BFA in Painting from the California College of the Arts, completed a post-baccalaureate in Painting at Columbia University School of Art, and earned an MFA from the University of California San Diego.

Did you know?

Joslyn has a personal relationship to the colour-shift car paint pigments she works with. The optical pigments are made using thin-film technologies invented by OCLI, a company her Grandfather co-founded in Northern California. She learned to airbrush at age 11 when her mother enrolled her in a summer art class at the San Diego Boys and Girls Club to keep her out of trouble.

Collaborations with Kara Joslyn