Putting art on the map

“Exterior and Interior Cartographies” Joyce Kozloff Regina Gouger Miller Gallery Carnegie… “Exterior and Interior Cartographies” Joyce Kozloff Regina Gouger Miller Gallery Carnegie Mellon University Through October 15 (412) 268-3618

For Joyce Kozloff, maps are much more than illustrations that show how to get from point A to point B. In “Exterior and Interior Cartographies,” on display at Carnegie Mellon’s Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Kozloff makes global statements with the maps she has created.

Kozloff’s artwork, created over the past ten years, is compelling to say the least. Her maps are not only topographical representations, but also statements against war, death and destruction. To put forth interpretations of the world from a new point of view, Kozloff has taken a formal idea – the map – and remade the color, line, shape and placement of shapes that we would find on the map.

In her series of maps called “Boys’ Art,” Kozloff has drawn 24 battlegrounds from China to Sevastapol. But what makes these maps personal to Kozloff, and strangely disquieting to the viewer, are figures – soldiers, supermen and monsters – drawn by Kozloff’s son, Nik, when he was a child.

Collaged onto the maps, Nik’s drawings provide an archaic and haunting look. Strange creatures fight battles and soldiers thrust their scribbled limbs at one another. It is as if Kozloff remarks that war itself is archaic. War, Kozloff seems to tell her viewer, is a strange and careless human action that is not necessary.

Kozloff conjures up curiosity with all of her maps, and every map is distinctive and remarkable in its own way. “Bodies of Water,” a large map of waterways, seems normal. But, upon closer inspection, one notices a spinal cord running up a river, then a spleen, a heart, a brain and other parts of the human body. Kozloff, playing with words and presenting a physical metaphor, forms a geographical map as well as an anatomical one.

It is hard to walk by the bright neon colors of “Newspaper Clippings.” Looking more closely, one will find hundreds of actual clippings from newspapers covering the map. Kozloff also creates three-dimensional art in “Rocking the Cradle,” a piece consisting of a large wooden cradle with a map painted inside.

What makes Kozloff’s art even more fascinating is the medium that she uses. Kozloff uses fresco on panel, canvas on paper, cloth, markers and even stickers to create a textured and visually stimulating map. Her maps are not only layered with meaning, but also with physical precision. To achieve this individualistic look, Kozloff had to go through many artistic styles.

Kozloff earned a bachelor of fine arts from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1964 and a master’s from Columbia University in 1967. After extensive travels to Spain, Turkey and Morocco, she returned to the United States to work on important architectural commissions. By the late 1970s, Kozloff was well-known for her work in design as well as being one of the instigators of the feminist art movement.

In the 1980s, Kozloff turned her work into a more erotic form of expression. In this period of Kozloff’s life, she began to examine pornography both historically and cross-culturally to infuse something unique and shocking into her designs. However, the increasing violence in the world spurred a new response in Kozloff’s artwork, and she began creating maps, weaving into them her own content.

“Exterior and Interior Cartographies” is an exhibit proving that voices can be heard through art. Both Joyce Kozloff and Ann Messner, creative director of “Disarming Images,” will talk about political unrest and the role of the artist as activist among other things Friday, Sept. 22, at 5:30 p.m. Messner’s video, a documentary on American protests, is also playing at Carnegie Mellon’s Regina Gouger Miller Gallery. The talk is free and open to the public.