Kara Joslyn (b. San Diego, CA) earned her MFA from UC San Diego in 2016 where was the nominee for the Robert Motherwell Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture and was awarded the MFA Graduate Teaching Fellowship. She completed her post baccalaureate studies in Painting at Columbia University School of the Arts and her BFA at California College of the Arts (San Francisco). Recent solo exhibitions include Please Throw Me Back in the Ocean, Perrotin, Seoul; This is Hardcore, Perrotin, New York; Mirror Window Door, M+B, Los Angeles; and Dandy in the Underworld, BOZOMAG, Los Angeles. Selected group exhibitions include From LAX to CDG, Stems Gallery, Paris, France; Hot Concrete: LA to HK, WOAW Gallery, K11 MUSEA, Hong Kong, China; Bad Girls, Wallspace, Dubai, UAE; Second Smile, The Hole, New York, NY; and Process, The Barrick Museum, Las Vegas, NV. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and The Barrick Museum in Las Vegas, NV. Kara Joslyn lives and works in Los Angeles.
Kara Joslyn’s enigmatic paintings describe a floating, liminal world of masked figures, geometric forms and moons. Using imagery from 1950s craft books, Joslyn divorces these figures, domestic interiors and decorative motifs from their original context, transforming the play images from domestic mid-century America into surreal, yet strikingly realistic forms on the canvas. With an interest in illusion and optics, Joslyn hand-mixes polymer car paints and applies them in a labor-intensive process of masking and airbrushing. Skillfully executed, these images mimic, codify and reflect on the surface to fool the eye and bring into view a symbolic space—the dreamlike tableaux of the unconscious.