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, creating a dense field of sincerity and visual deception. All of her work is airbrushed on canvas using masking techniques that were originally invented to create graphic design and illustration before...
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, creating a dense field of sincerity and visual deception. All of her work is airbrushed on canvas using masking techniques that were originally invented to create graphic design and illustration before computers. Joslyn’s subjects are often portrayed against a black, boundless background. This creates multi-dimensional 3D illusions, harnessing a mystifying quality. Joslyn describes the light in her painting as “moonlight”. Bathed in this iridescent moonlight, her subjects are never what they seem.
In the same way that the moon reflects the sun's beams, Joslyn's paintings mirror our society's contemporary thoughts. Joslyn’s paintings challenge the perceptions of history, as well as the viewer. Like her retelling of the story of Eve in Body: HA HA HA. XO, Hel, 2022 where she depicts a woman who refused to leave the Garden of Eden. Or the immortality of her Cosmic Dancer (I danced myself right out the womb, I danced myself into the tomb and then again, once more), 2022. As she says, “I am, indeed, looking for an echo in the cave.”
Kara Joslyn (she/her) was born in San Diego, California. She now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
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.
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.
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