Looking at good art rocks my world. It turns me on or elevates my mood after a bummer workday or makes me think of or see the world in a different way. It also demands multiple viewings. Each time I return to a good piece, I learn or see something different. Karla Wozniak’s new drawings and super fine new oil paintings push you to do just that. They’ll take you on a trip, in the process changing your mood, your day, the way you see. They’ll make you look again at an American landscape you constantly drive through and—speaking for myself, mostly don’t even register—in a wholly unique new way. They’ll make you pay attention.

Wozniak commands this attention through her use of composition and sweet painting skills. She shoots pictures through the car window on road trips. The shot takes an instant, but she takes months to paint that second, getting the time of day right, the light, elevating—illuminating—places she’s often just passing through. And in a sense we go for the ride with her.

Take a gander at “Battle Creek, MI.” It’s a schizophrenic take on landscape painting with some elements cartoonish and others pure mood in a riot of color and styles, with a piece of chalk stuck in the bottom right-hand corner of the frame. It has an amazingly worked-over surface and is achingly beautiful. The blue shadow or line that runs from top left to bottom right conjures the death of the auto industry and the loss of the American Dream, or at least the dilution of it. It speaks emotional volumes.

Look at the piece again. Now walk away.

I find it interesting that Wozniak starts with a photograph.  In 2005 she got an Alice Kimball travel grant from Yale (where she earned her MFA) and drove cross-country. She shot oodles of pics—from Florida to Cali, Texas to Michigan, Ohio too!—that later became her source material. She continues to work this way. To get all art-historical for a moment, the photograph thing harkens back to the WPA-commissioned works of artists like Walker Evans who traveled the US during the Great Depression. Wozniak is documenting our own Great Recession.  But instead of doing that in a straightforward documentary way, she’s tapping into our Internet attention span, our changed and scrambled way of viewing the world, and making paintings of urban landscapes in transition. You can tell she admires photography too. I get the subject and compositional style of Stephen Shore, and also the screwy viewpoint of William Eggleston. Wozniak is fascinated by neglect and the way places change over time.

Look at “Mom’s Tattoo.” Her handling of the material is rigid in some places (take a look at how she’s tamed the rose).  But then there’s the improvisational sky. There’ a dichotomy going on between the regionally specific and the impressionistic. Look at the bottom of the Tattoo sign itself. Here the brushstroke, the texture, is built-up and yummy.  Wozniak also takes into account the weather, the time of day and the lighting, and then connects these elements, achieving a fragile balance. So a real place has been rearranged, improvised, collaged. 

Now let’s look at the drawings. I love how the paper itself is all fucked-up, soiled with art materials and the artist’s hand. There are areas of rigor and representation and a crazy Abstract Expressionism going on too. There are also moments of repose in the work. Wozniak very smartly guides our eye to the calm within her storm. This is what makes her great—because in that fracturing, that building up and breaking down, that distillation, improvisation and specificity, she shows us what it means to live at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Our attention spans are fractured, our relationships to place are breaking down and we spend more and more of our days glued to computer screens. Wozniak is waking us up, kicking us in the ass and through a jumble of styles, influences, techniques and materials, making us connect to nature and the shifting landscape of the country we live in.

Go to “Battle Creek, MI” again. What do you see now?  I just grooved on that crazy Mary Heilmann-style section of crosshatched—what is it, grass? Also the fact that the entire painting is like an Elizabeth Murray cutup within a single canvas. Take another look around the gallery. Revisit your fave. The work demands it. It is super fine. Reenter the Wozniak world. You just might learn something new about our country, our landscape—hell, even yourself. I know I have.

Brian Quirk
November 2009

Brian Quirk is a playwright and actor living in New York.