M+B is pleased to announce Mirror Window Door, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Kara Joslyn. This is Joslyn’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will run from September 18 through October 16, 2021. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 18, from 6:00 to 8:00pm.
In Mirror Window Door, Joslyn expands on her atlas of figures and spaces that merge the symbolic with the real. Primarily sourced from mid-century instructional booklets for making paper figurines, her enigmatic subjects remain anchored to forms in the material world. Through Joslyn’s deft rendering of surfaces, the folded, creased, and curved sheets of paper assume a metaphysical dimension while conveying the wonder of observable reality. The paintings capture the journey to a parallel plane of reality, where figures defy any straightforward interpretation.
Kara Joslyn’s work takes, as its central theme, the idea of storytelling and image-making. The eye plays itself, cast as trickster-redeemer, capturing the unexpected and unfolding the strangeness of things. Figures emerge from black backgrounds. Others are drawn in outsized proportions. All done by hand in a precise and laborious airbrush process, Joslyn’s paintings form an atmospheric realm of images that inspire active speculation from the viewer. They are portals into another reality, almost as if one is entering a different state of being. Each painting is its own resonant vignette, and experienced together, they capture an imaginary world that is by turns unsettling and inviting.
Kara Joslyn (b. San Diego, CA) received her BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, completed post-baccalaureate studies in Painting at Columbia University, New York and has an MFA at the University of California, San Diego. Joslyn was a nominee for the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and a two-time nominee for the Robert Motherwell Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. She received the Russell Foundation Grant in 2014 for her work with Holography at UCSD. Exhibitions include those at 356 Mission (Los Angeles), The Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), The Barrick Museum (Las Vegas) and Bizkaia Aretoa University of the Basque Country (Bilbao). Her 2019 solo exhibition at M+B, Tragic Kingdom, was an Artforum Critics’ Pick. Other recent press includes a profile in Ambit Magazine. Kara Joslyn lives and works in Los Angeles.
