Julia Couzens: Maidment

Julia Couzens M

a

i

d

m

e

n

t

Julia Couzens Maidment University Art Gallery Department of Art College of the Arts California State University, Stanislaus

500 copies printed Julia Couzens - Maidment University Art Gallery Department of Art College of the Arts California State University, Stanislaus November 2 - December 18, 2009

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus

Copyright © 2010 California State University, Stanislaus All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

University Art Gallery College of the A California State University, Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382

Catalog Design: Kristina Stamper, College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus Catalog Printing: Claremont Print and Copy, Claremont, CA Catalog Photography: David M. Roth

ISBN: 978-0-9802410-5-1

Cover Image: Root Ball, 2009, 30”x30”x17”, mixed wire, rope, yarn, thread, tape

Contents

Director’s Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Nature’s Tatting: Julia Couzens’s Exploration of Line Essay by Victoria Dalkey ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������5 Veiny, Nesty, Whorly Essay by Renny Pritikin ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������6

Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Resume. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Director’s Foreword Julia Couzens’s exhibition, Maidment showcases the ever-expanding world of Julia Couzens’s art. From Julia’s early work of investigating spider webs to the newest work inspired by textiles, her art is most enjoyed when experienced first hand. Her steady hand creates artwork that is a pleasure to view. I am very pleased to be able to exhibit her work for others to enjoy.

Many colleagues have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. I would like to thank Julia Couzens for the privilege of exhibiting her astounding work, Victoria Dalkey and Renny Pritikin for their wonderful essays, College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the wonderful catalog design and Claremont Print and Copy for their expertise in printing this catalog.

A great thanks is extended to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker, Director University Art Gallery California State University, Stanislaus

4

Nature’s Tatting: Julia Couzens’s Exploration of Line “The great painters, like Raphael and Michelangelo, have insisted on line in finishing. They have reiterated it with a fine brush and thus they have reanimated the contour; they have imprinted vitality and rage upon their drawing.”

Jean-August-Dominique Ingres Drawing, the most direct and unmediated medium for art is at the core of Julia Couzens’s practice. Over the years, she has explored drawing in all of its forms from rendering to contour drawing and continues to explore the medium with an emphasis on line in her most recent work.

Line with all its sinuous pleasures and eccentric jottings takes center stage in her tape drawings, made with small strips of library tape in varying widths and lengths. These decidedly odd works are full of graphic energy as they explore line in terms of speed and action. Here, line defines dance. Couzens’s movements have the planned awkwardness and elegance of Fred Astaire as she works her way through abstract linear patterns that suggest references to the body and the natural world as well as invisible realms.

Fingerprints and nerve networks reference the body, while explosions of lines call up associations with dark fireworks against a white sky, a kind of negative picturing that accesses the skeleton of a constellation or conflagration. These labor intensive drawings, which must be cut and then pressed into the paper, slow Couzens’s hand down to the point of the kind of intense engagement she craves and which can so easily be circumvented by her natural facility and elegant graphology.

Line in Couzens’s work extends back to the charcoal portraits she began with and reaches forward into her current sculptures. In her latest cage-like forms wrapped with twine and rope, yarn and fabrics, she defines form with curvaceous lines and crevices that refer abstractly to the body as did her earlier charcoal renderings of bodily forms turned inside out. While drawing is the central impulse of these pieces, she also “paints” with her materials, forming thickets of colored lines that define form and suggest space. From pieces exploding with skeins of colored twine and yarn to a sombre densely dark piece with flecks of color enlivening the surface, she fantasizes form into space, positing eccentric yet moving presences that relate viscerally to our own bodies or portions thereof.

Couzens’s use of unconventional materials extends back to quirky sculptural forms made of resins that formed a kind of human comedy of unidentifiable body parts and to large environments of lacy tattings and crocheted scrims made of twist ties and pipe cleaners that referenced landscape, a paean to nature’s tatting in thickets of vines, undergrowth and arboreal foliage. In her recent work she carries those impulses into pure form with a complex scrim made of plastic strawberry baskets cut up and reassembled into something resembling Moorish decorative motifs, Amish quilts and lace tablecloths.

Appearing to be both haphazard and intended, the scrim twinkles with light and varying hues of green and blue and fluorescent chartreuse created by the angle and direction of the geometric patterns set up by the disassembled baskets. It’s a very high form of art, a kind of celestial hilarity, an off-the-wall dance of geometric forms that has the verve of Matissean cutouts and the glitzy luxe of high fashion.

Ultimately Couzens’s work takes us to the highest levels of taste, a currently unfashionable and most difficult thing to define but that which makes all the difference in the world. She has indeed “imprinted vitality and rage” on her work with a passion both cutting and joyful.

Victoria Dalkey, October 31, 2009 Victoria Dalkey, art correspondent for The Sacramento Bee, is a published poet and writer.

5

Veiny, Nesty, Whorly The world is invisible to us until we are ready to see it.

We notice an occasional sparrow but with time and focus we could discover a vast avian economy that cohabits our towns. An artist is someone who has trained in the skill of paying attention when a breach forms in the everyday and a glimpse of something profound and overlooked comes into focus. This is called research; it is also called inspiration.

For Julia Couzens this experience happened most recently on a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. She was intending to visit one show but found herself instead at another: an exhibition of large-scale antique European lace. She was transfixed. Couzens still speaks with an emotion-filled vocabulary of the thrilling “liney, nesty, webby, veiny, fingerprintwhorl” works she found there. Couzens was open to being carried away like that because her facility with drawing was no longer satisfying her; she needed something less predictably artful and complete.

Colored masking tape is ubiquitous behind-the-scenes in the art world. It is used to temporarily place paper on walls or on other pieces of paper; its very light tackiness enables it to be moved frequently without tearing the work, or leaving stains. Couzens noticed just such a roll of tape in her studio shortly after her Chicago experience, and it occurred to her that she might cut narrow strips of black tape and make drawings with that. It would require her to learn a new skill, and the concomitant need to pay close attention would end her dissatisfaction with what she felt were rote and boring techniques she knew too well.

The resulting works were, and are, a wonder. The earliest ones are entirely abstract, with branch-like lines sparingly attached to white paper. With their vast patches of ground they’re like late de Kooning paintings, with isolated brush strokes in a sea of thoughtful restraint. The lines are crisp and decisive and minute touches of color balance their austerity. Another parallel is the recent work of Jim Melchert, the renowned Bay Area artist and sometime ceramicist who has been making works that use off-white commercial tiles. He drops them from short heights, resulting in networks of cracks; Melchert then inserts colored glazes wherever two cracks meet. Couzens adds dots and dashes of blue tape equally strategically. Their art is markedly similar: webs and tangles of gorgeous lines in which color appearances are events beyond what their modest presence might predict. Iron filings are used to make invisible magnetic lines visible; Couzens thinks of these drawings as “filings” that make invisible emotional and aesthetic choices visible.

Most artists have clear signs on their shop windows as you stroll past on the street: Digital Photographer; Conceptual Sculptor; Plein Air Painter. There’s no sign on Couzen’s building. Despite a long and celebrated career Couzens does not have a signature style; she’s worked with drawing, sculpture, installation, painting in myriad ways. Like many artists today, she uses whatever medium helps her best solve the problem on which she is working. To some extent she could also be considered an artists’ artist. That is, she has the respect of her peers, and students, and a circle of collectors for her consistently intelligent and rigorous body of work, but a wider general public is less aware of her work than would be expected given the level of professional esteem in which her work is held. The status of not having a signature style and being an artist’s artist is not a comfortable one. It contains an inherent mixed-message that is a formula for discontent. Many artists fall into that category because they make work that: entails skills that are hard to appreciate by non-practitioners; is dry, esoteric or plain; is particularly hard to live with for collectors; demonstrates a breakthrough insight that is not yet understood outside of the world of artists; or is of great subtlety. Most artists at some time fall into these categories, including Couzens. Time will tell if the work in the current show, Maidment, marks a signature development in her work, one that might clearly define Couzenshood for her followers.

Maidment is a pun of sorts. Couzens came across it in the title of a book about textile art and inferred a meaning about handmade, fabric-based work long associated with women’s craft. Later she discovered that it was actually the name of a significant collector and writer in the field. There are three major new tape drawings included in the exhibition, each roughly 18 inches by 24, in black and blue. These flirt with representation; one can readily impose landscape, tree trunks and the like on these innocent convocations of lines, averaging between half an inch and one inch wide. A piece that flows vertically suggests a close-up of trees, perhaps gnawed halfway up by beavers. A horizontal piece suggests harvested logs floating downstream; a third has more jagged internal borders suggesting cut-up technique. The viewer must work to remember that Couzens is drawing with scissors, that these effortless lines are in fact the result of the most skillful heights that only a mature artist can achieve. Suggestive or abstract, these works are unlike anything Couzens, or anyone else, has shown in recent years, and are, undeniably, lovely.

6

One subtext of the show is the effect on lines of being rendered, respectively, in two and three dimensions. Couzens has continued her investigation of (paper-tape) lines with three sculptures by swathing acres of string and related binding and stretchy material around metal grids she makes. This kind of wrapping is a form most often associated with outsider artists, such as the late Bay Area artist Judith Scott. There are two ways to approach the form: one is to obscure an object held inside, creating the allure of time capsules or other suggestive hidden-treasure containers, the consummate example of which would be Pandora’s box. The other approach is for the surface of the object to be the purpose of the work, both in its form and its texture. The latter is Couzens’s approach. In the first new sculpture, Unspooled and Tricked Out, Couzens’ has barreled her car right through the “Caution Detour” barrier and come to a crashing stop on Excess Avenue just off Discomfit Street. It’s a hoot. Evocative of god’s eyes and dream catchers from New Age art, in a marriage with cat’s cradles, her surface is redolent with memories of tangled fishing line, a mattress tied to the roof of a small car by improvised cords, and overly enthusiastic stitching on blue jeans. Couzens designs all of this, so that it becomes an essay about the taxonomy of line: clashing textures, lengths and shapes, all compounded by an inherently garish commercial color palette. A drawn line is a narrative and in this and the second sculpture, French With a Twist, the narrative dips, turns corners, goes into caves and travels alongside counter narratives. There are stories that are interrupted and overwhelmed by contradictory stories. The operative word is improvisation and the motivation is “emergency response.”

French With a Twist is much like the masterwork Edward Weston photograph, Shell and rock arrangement, (1931), in which the glowing white interior of the shell dominates the dusky outside world of beach and stone. An inwardly curving work, with browns and other dark shades on its exterior, it explodes from inside with brilliant yellows. Both lead up to the third sculpture, a masterwork of her own, titled WT, DJ, JS and Franz. The piece is deeply, startlingly black, with internal tectonic slippages. Tiny inches of blue, yellow and red emerge from its depths with longer study. It’s as though she had reached into a wall and pulled out an Anish Kapoor and put it on a pedestal without losing any of its depth and inwardness.

Finally, Couzens shows a curtain work some 90 inches square, made of the walls and bases of green plastic berry baskets, broken and edited into almost unrecognizable squares, all different as snowflakes. The wall behind is partially painted a lime green parallel to but more subtle than the plastic, affording the work an ephemeral green light bouncing back and forth between the wall and the art work. Couzens here pursues another aspect of line: less hand-made, more rigid, a semaphore of short barking utterances with subtle changes from phoneme to phoneme—as opposed to the drawings and sculpture surfaces made up of long discursive sentences. In all cases the language of the message is clear: you’re in the presence of a rigorous and not uncourageous artist in her prime.

Copyright Renny Pritikin 2009 Renny Pritikin is the director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and The Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis. Before that he was the chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2009 he published a catalogue essay about the paintings of Cornelia Schulz for the Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, and was interviewed in Proximity magazine in Chicago. Proximity will also be publishing Pritikin’s essay on outsiders in the arts in 2009. He has taught in the graduate program in curatorial practice at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, since its inception in 2003.

7

8

I M A G ES

9

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 12” x 9”

10

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 12” x 9”

11

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 12” x 9”

12

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 12” x 9”

13

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 12” x 9”

14

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 12” x 9”

15

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 14” x 11”

16

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 14” x 11”

17

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 22” x 17”

18

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 14” x 22”

19

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 9” x 12”

20

Filings, 2009, tape on velum, 17” x 22”

21

French, With a Twist, 2009, wire, rope, yarn, thread, 33” x 28” x 15”

22

French, With a Twist, alternate view

23

Root Ball, 2009, wire, rope, yarn, thread, 30” x 30” x 17”

24

Root Ball, alternate view

25

26

Root Ball, detail (above)

French, With a Twist, detail (left)

27

For D.J., F.W., J.S., and W.T., 2009, wire, yarn, thread, 29” x 38” x 26”

28

For D.J., F.W., J.S., and W.T., alternate view

29

Untitled, 2009, plastic, 12” x 9”

30

Untitled, detail

31

Julia Couzens Julia Couzens lives and works on Merritt Island, Clarksburg, California EDUCATION 1990

Master of Fine Arts, University of California, Davis

AWARDS 1996 Western States Arts Federation, Awards in the Visual Arts. Honorable Mention - Sculpture 1995 The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York. Visual Artist Fellowship 1995 Art Matters, New York. Visual Artist Fellowship 1994 Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico. Artist-in-Residence, 1994-1995 1989 University of California, Davis. Graduate Research Fellowship Award INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS 2009 Maidment, University Art Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus 2005 Strange Fascination, Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, California 2003 Vagrant Fancies, Davis Art Center, Davis, California

Net Work, The Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California 2000 34 Collaborations: Julia Couzens and Joan Moment, California Arts Council, Department of Justice, Sacramento CA 1999 Julia Couzens: Drawings, Paintings, Objects: 1990-1999, Richard L. Nelson Gallery and The Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis 1999 Julia Couzens: Survey of Work from 1990-1998, Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, Santa Rosa, California 1997 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California 1997 Robert Else Gallery, California State University, Sacramento 1996 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California 1995 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California 1994 Michael Himovitz Gallery, Sacramento, California 1993 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California 1993 Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 1992 Sheppard Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno 1991 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California 1990 Memorial Union Gallery, University of California, Davis 1989 Michael Himovitz Gallery, Sacramento, California 1987 Jeremy Stone Gallery, San Francisco, California SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2010 Sacramento City College, Sacramento CA. Homecoming, Suzanne Adan and Michael Stevens, Curators 2009 Pence Gallery, Davis CA. Geo Morph, curated by Dave Roth

1020: An Exhibition Honoring the Michael Himovitz Gallery, Temporary Contemporary, Sacramento CA 2008 Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento. Contemporary Drawings and Works on Paper.

The Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis. Flatlanders 2: A Regional Biennial Exhibition, curated by

Renny Pritikin. Catalogue.

2007 Roswell Museum of Art, Roswell, New Mexico. Beyond A Gift of Time. Catalogue.

New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain CN. The Joanne and William Rees Collection.

2006 Another Year in L.A., Los Angeles CA. Art Store.

2005 John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis CA. Art Tomorrow: Western Biennale of Art.

Edward Lucie-Smith, guest curator. Catalogue.

2004 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica CA. The L.A Years.

2003 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento CA. The Pilot Hill Collection of Contemporary Art. Travels to Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown OH; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christie TX. Catalogue.

2002 University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Out of True

Sheppard Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno. Holding the Line/Contemporary Drawing Survey 2001 Memphis College of Art, Memphis TN. Blemish. Catalogue

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento CA. Altares Nuevos: Contemporary Northern California Artists

Encina Art Gallery, Sacramento CA. Girl Talk.

2000 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco CA. Pierogi 2000 Flat Files.

POST, Los Angeles CA, Haulin’ Ass: Pierogi in L.A.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery and Fine Art Collection, University of California, Davis. Selected Recent Acquisitions.

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento CA. Recent Acquisitions.

32

Reynolds Gallery, University of the Pacific, Stockton CA. Push Push.

Artists Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento CA. Simply Drawing.

North American Interdisciplinary Conference on Environment, University of Nevada, Reno. BioArt. 1999 Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont CA. Drawing the Line

Big Art, Sacramento CA. The Big End. Long Beach City College Art Gallery, Long Beach CA. Focused Visions 1998 Trans-America Building, San Francisco CA. Translucent

Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman College, Orange CA. Off the Wall.

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CN. American Art at Yale: 25 Years of Collecting 1997 Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco CA. Recent Acquisitions of the Achenbach Collection: 1991-1996.

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA. The California Biennial Exhibition. Catalogue.

The City Gallery at Chastain, Atlanta GA. Gross Exaggeration: Work by Julia Couzens and Sarah Whipple.

Miller Fine Art, Los Angeles CA. Dry. Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas NV. Beauty is the Beast Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles CA. L.A.Current: New Work on Paper 1996 Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro NC. Art on Paper, 1996. Catalogue

Ten in One Gallery, Chicago IL. Left of Center: New Art from L.A. Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena CA. Drawn from L.A. 1995 P.P.O.W., New York NY. Postmarked L.A. Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria, Austin TX. Rethinking the Natural. Travels through 1997. Catalogue

Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco CA. Contact: 114th Annual Exhibition. Catalogue

Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica CA. An Offering to San Simon.

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles CA. Vital Signs.

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento CA. Experience Into Art. Catalogue.

1994 Roswell Museum, Roswell NM. 1994 Artist in Residence Exhibition.

College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Martha Alf, Judie Bamber, Julia Couzens, Susan Hauptman.

Woodbury University Art Gallery, Burbank CA. Contemporary Drawings.

1992 Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena CA. Drawings as Poems.

American Cultural Center, American Embassy, Brussells, Belgium Discovery: Contemporary California Narrations.

Riverside Art Museum, Riverside CA. (basically) Black and White.

U.S. Information Services, American Embassy, Bombay, India. California Contemporaries.

1991 Harris Fine Arts Center, Brigham Young University, Provo UT. Drawing 1991

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento CA. A Tribute Exhibition: Works on Paper and Sculpture by Selected Crocker Kingsley Artists. Catalogue.

1990 Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown OH. California A - Z and Return. Catalogue.

Lang Gallery, Claremont Colleges, Claremont CA. Art at Scripps: Faculty Exhibition.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis. Selected Recent Acquisitions: Work by Northern California Artists.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, California Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, New Mexico Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio California State University, Sacramento, California Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada Equitable Life, New York, New York Fine Arts Museum, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah The Frederick Weisman Collection, Los Angeles, California Hewlett-Packard, Dublin, Ireland KVIE 6 Public Television, Sacramento, California Montgomery Securities, San Francisco, California Marriott Hotel, Anaheim, California New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut Oakland Museum, Oakland, California Richard L. Nelson Gallery & Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis Sacramento City College, Sacramento, California Saks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills, California and Denver, Colorado Sheraton Grand Hotel, Sacramento, California Syntex Corporation, Palo Alto. California University Art Museum, Berkeley, California Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

33

Acknowledgements California State University, Stanislaus

Dr. Hamid Shirvani, President

Mr. Daryl Joseph Moore frsa, Founding Dean, College of the Arts

Ms. Susana Gajic-Bruyea, Vice President for University Advancement

Dr. James T. Strong, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Department of Art

Gordon Senior, Chair, Professor

Dean De Cocker, Associate Professor

Jessica Gomula, Assistant Professor

David Olivant, Professor

Dr. Roxanne Robbin, Professor

Richard Savini, Professor

Dr. Hope Werness, Professor Emeritus

Rowena d’Mar Shimun, Administrative Support Assistant

Christian Hali, Instructional Support Technician II

Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II

University Art Gallery

Dean De Cocker, Director

This catalog is dedicated to the memory of John FitzGibbon.

“Avoid the Noid.”

34