Kara Joslyn Presents "This Is Hardcore" at Perrotin
On view in New York until April 16.
“If photography is the false index — the truth that tells a lie,” said painter Kara Joslyn, “I like to think of painting as the trick — the lie that tells the truth.” Based in Los Angeles, Joslyn is an emerging artist whose monochromatic aesthetic beckons with hidden truths and kinetic energy.
As her first solo exhibition in New York, Joslyn is presenting “This Is Hardcore” at Perrotin. Each painting serves as an appropriation of sorts, by featuring a number of symbolic elements conjoined together in a mythic display that contrasts sharply against the black background she paints using a combination of acrylic and polymer automotive paint.
Joslyn uses this graphic pastiche to explore the gaps between the material world and dream-like impressions, mapping the slippages between earnest storytelling and elusive trickery that constitute our sense of self. Instead of tapping into traditional muses seen across Renaissance paintings, this new body of work imbues the muse, as Perrotin’s Ryan Maggione writes, “with the kinetic energy of American underground subcultures, blending the sheen of rave culture and the impulse of hardcore punk into a system of timeless, or out of time, iconography.”
“This is Hardcore” is neither an affirmation nor a denial of our shared reality, but rather, Joslyn seeks to represent slices of the “cultural unconscious without judgment, as if to say, “it is what it is.” Working in the vein of American absurdism, subcultural drama, and dream- state archetypes, Joslyn takes a trickster’s swipe at popular mythology, lending it a sense of redemptive forward motion,” Maggione added. The exhibition is currently on view at Perrotin New York until April 16.
Also on view in NYC, Gagosian presents the fictive architecture of Iranian artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo.
Perrotin
130 Orchard St.
New York, NY 10002
