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Los Angeles, USA • b. 1983
Kara Joslyn explores themes of storytelling and illusion through her multi-dimensional paintings. The artist’s moonlit spaces merge fantasy and reality, creating allegories of her own that are at once unsettling and inviting. Using 1950s instructional craft books and mythology as source material, she relocates domestic and decorative figures into timeless, and uncanny scenes. As appropriator, forager, and translator, Joslyn engages the viewer’s eye as trickster. Interested in illusion, she uses a mixture of powdered optical automotive paint pigments that appear holographic. Her airbrush technique — historically used in graphic design before the invention of computers — heightens the atmosphere by creating a digital-like image, combined with Caravaggio inspired lighting. Altogether, the artist's tableaux allow us to travel back and forth in time, intertwining historical symbolism with futuristic dimensionality, as well as our own unconscious. As Joslyn says, “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."
