Julia Couzens

Julia Couzens (born 1947) is a California-based, American artist known for a diverse body of work that embraces unconventional materials and methods and includes drawing, sculpture, installation art, and writing.[1][2][3] Curator David Roth identifies as a connecting thread in her evolving work, her "decidedly surrealist-symbolist sensibility, in which eroticism, the grotesque and the gothic mix in equal parts."[4] Her work has been shown internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Christopher Grimes Gallery[5][6] and California State University, Stanislaus (2009),[1] in surveys at the University of California, Davis and Sonoma Museum of Visual Art (1999),[7][8] and group shows at the Crocker Art Museum,[9] P•P•O•W (New York), Orange County Museum of Art,[10] Hammer Museum, and BAMPFA, among others.[11][12] Her art has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times,[13] San Francisco Chronicle,[14] Flash Art,[5] New Art Examiner,[15] and Art Practical,[11] among other publications,[16][17][18] and collected by institutions including the Crocker Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California and Butler Institute of American Art, among many.[19][20][12] In addition to working as an artist, Couzens has taught at several Southern California universities and writes about contemporary art for The Sacramento Bee and Squarecylinder.[21][22] She lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg and maintains a studio in downtown Los Angeles.[23]

Julia Couzens, Chanteuse, Mixed textiles, pins, thread, 12" x 14.5" x 4", 2016
Julia Couzens
Born1947
Auburn, California
NationalityAmerican
EducationUniversity of California, Davis, California State University, Sacramento, California College of Arts and Crafts, California State University, Chico
Known forDrawing, sculpture, installation, writing
AwardsLouis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship, Art Matters, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program
Websitewww.juliacouzens.com

Early life and career

Couzens was born and raised in Auburn, California. Her mother, Jean Little Couzens, was founding editor of West Art, the coast's first contemporary art newspaper, circa 1960.[24][9] After studying English and philosophy at California State University, Chico (BA, 1970), Couzens moved to Oakland, where she worked at a law school, explored San Francisco's bohemian scene, and took classes at California College of Arts and Crafts; an early work was part of the Crocker-Kingsley competition at the Crocker Art Museum in 1972.[9]

After moving to Sacramento in 1977, Couzens studied art at City College, California State University, Sacramento (MA, 1987) and University of California (UC), Davis (MFA, 1990), where she worked with Robert Arneson, Squeak Carnwath, Manuel Neri, Cornelia Schulz, and Wayne Thiebaud.[25] Her studies were interrupted by an accident in 1989 that forced a long recovery in a wheelchair and crutches and shifted her art from large abstractions using unconventional materials to small charcoal drawings she could do in her lap.[25] They led to her first mature work, atmospheric charcoal drawings that fused abstraction and figuration.[9][25] During and after graduate studies, Couzens drew attention for her art in shows at the Christopher Grimes (Santa Monica), Jeremy Stone (San Francisco) and Michael Himovitz (Sacramento) galleries; the Oakland Museum and Yale University also acquired works.[14][25][26] She began teaching at this time, at Scripps College, and later at UC (Santa Cruz and Davis) and California State University, Sacramento between 1990–2003; she was a visiting artist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and San Francisco Art Institute.[27]

Work
Julia Couzens, Respirandi Spatium, charcoal on paper, 43" x 55", 1992

Critics and curators note that Couzens's practice is fluid and wide-ranging, encompassing several identifiable bodies and mediums and a multitude of materials, rather than any one signature style.[1][28][29] Common to them is an intuitive, sometimes "obsessive, hyperactive working process" that resists intellectualization[30] in its investigations of bodily form and being, nature, and matter.[31][8][32] Writers have recognized Surrealist Georges Bataille and Symbolist Odilon Redon as influences in her earlier, body-derived work;[26][33] her later fabric, fiber and network bodies of work have been likened to the constructions of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, and to the found-material installations of Annette Messager and Judy Pfaff.[28][30]

Body-derived works (1989–1999)

Couzens's body-derived work ranges from monumental figurative-based charcoal drawings to abstract watercolors that evoke internal cellular realities to sculptural objects resembling external body parts.[9][4] Writer Debra Wilbur suggested that this work created mystery through its oscillation between the micro- and macroscopic,[34] while curator Bruce Guenther located its fascination in its hovering between being "seductive and grotesque, abstract and referential."[10]

Julia Couzens, Untitled, watercolor on paper, 30" x 20", 2003

"Mortal Lessons" (1990–2003)

Couzens has long been recognized for her draftsmanship, and writers (herself included) consider it to be at the core of her practice, even in later sculptural work.[10][35][36] She first gained attention in the late 1980s for large charcoal drawings of headless, armless, torso-like forms floating in amorphous space (e.g., Respirandi Spatium, 1993), that were noted for their Seurat-like shadings of dark and light and mystical, funereal quality.[14][37][38] Contrasting the lushly drawn forms and their surfaces pocked with scars, slashes and fissures, writers such as Jody Zellen observed that the work exposed human vulnerability to emotional and physical "tears,"[6] yet indulged erotic paradoxes of beauty and terror, attraction and repulsion.[38][39][8] Couzens also painted color-saturated, vaporous watercolors[40] alluding to eyes, breasts and microscopic, coalescing or replicating corpuscles, membranes and cells (e.g., Untitled, 2003).[41][33][9] Susan Kandel noted the work's ability to evoke psychological states—claustrophobia, joy, loneliness, liberation—despite its abstraction; David Roth foregrounded its "spiritual search for the microscopic origins of life."[26][33][39] In the mid-1990s, Couzens created randomly configured, gallery-wide drawing installations, such as Ab Intra Galore (1994), composed of large sheets of tumbling black orbs whose minimal, abstract patterns alluded to cells, DNA, and mitosis.[10][42][8]

Julia Couzens, Physical Culture No. 1, mixed plastics, pigment on panel, 12" x 11" x 4.5", 1997

"Globules" (1995–9)

While participating in the Roswell Artist-in-Residency program, Couzens noted a kinship between locally popular, decorative plastic grapes and her drawing forms.[31][9] Looking to shift away from her drawing work, she began transforming the grapes into humorous, vaguely perverse, paint and liquid resin-coated entities that evoked cells, eggs and eyes, using the modeling compound, Sculpey.[3][31] These experiments became the "Globules" series[43]—surreal abstract sculptures situated between the animate and inanimate, which seemingly grew from gallery walls. Critics described them as "fascinating as well as grotesque, monstrous as well as beautiful,"[6] and "indecent, ill-mannered and lewd" representations of the "latent potential for the body to run amok."[34][9][31] Between 1994 and 1995, she created Lingua Franca (loosely translated, "common tongue"), an 11' by 14' wall array of 3,200 individually formed tongues, first installed at the Crocker Art Museum.[39][44][45] Art Week wrote that the "pink, fleshy, palpitating field" suggested myriad references—linguistic, sensory, salacious and lewd—while operating at a purely visual level from a distance.[46] Related works included Witness Syndrome (1995), a 13' column of watery eye- or undersea-like organisms that emerged from a corner, and the "Congeries" series—"heaps" of gelatinous-like material that included doll parts, such as Physical Culture No. 1 (1997).[9][42][10] Debra Wilbur described this work as upending "the usual representational banality of body parts" to depict its "mutated, disarticulated, and sometimes morbid aspects."[34]

Fabric, fiber and net works (2003– )

In 2001, a chance viewing of an Art Institute of Chicago exhibition of European lace inspired a new breakthrough in Couzens's art at a time when she sought to pursue work "less predictably artful and complete" than in the past.[1][28] The intricate whorls and linear patterns of the lace suggested webs, nests, veins and fingerprints, leading her work to attend more to natural forces beyond the body and cultural issues involving domesticity and power.[1] Three major bodies of work emerged: the web-like, three-dimensional "Net Work" fabrications; the "Tape" drawings, in which she "drew" using scissors, a matte knife and cut tape on vellum; and the "Bundles," which were sculptural forms tightly wrapped with twine, rope, yarn and fabric.[47][30][35][2] Critics noted the linear energy of this work, comparing it to the frenzied thickets of gesture in the late paintings of Willem de Kooning; Couzens has described the three–dimensional works as "drawings in space."[28][1]

Julia Couzens, La Little Thing, twist-ties, pipe cleaners, wire, threads, beret 7' 10', 2003

"Net Works" (2003–9)

Couzens's "Net Works" were uncanny, sometimes slapstick, dangling webs and woven nets that she fabricated from eclectic, mundane materials, such as twist-ties, pipe cleaners, shoelaces, neckties and wire, and suspended as sculpture or draped as wall hangings and scrims.[47][35] Their assortment of visual reference points—spider webs, seaweed, dense underbrush, crochet, networks—signaled a departure from distinct objects to more ambiguous, shifting matrices of nature and culture unraveling, ensnaring or conjoining that emphasized fragility, ephemerality and tenuousness.[47][28][48] Her show "Net Work" (2003)[49] featured wall pieces whose allusions ranged from eroticism (La Little One) to the figure (Ultra Light) to landscape (Fancy).[28] In "Strange Fascination" (2006), she expanded the work spatially and materially, transforming steel cages, yarn, electrical tape, lighting fixtures, fabric, and more, into obsessive pieces that referenced domesticity and femininity.[30] David Roth described the show as a parasitically spreading, "sprawling, near-gothic accretion of accumulated 'junk,' […] both installation and performance" and as "a Technicolor jumble cum jungle."[30]

Throughout the 2000s, Couzens has complemented her sculptural work with the "Tape Drawings"[50]—largely abstract patterns of linear energy that she creates through a labor-intensive process of layering cut strips and filing-like dashes of black and blue tape on vellum, with occasional touches of paint.[28][35] Critics observe that the drawings offer a cooler, more deliberate, synthetic investigation of line, network, node and space compared to the more romantic and natural nets.[47][48][2] They have been described as a "visual haiku,"[51] referencing fingerprints, trees, constellations or fireworks.[35]

"Bundles" (2009– )

Couzens's "Bundles"[52] consist of intuitive, abstract sculptural forms evoking god's eyes, dreamcatchers or cat's cradles, that she builds up through processes of wrapping, binding, stitching and layering, and displays as wall pieces or floating "satellites," such as Chanteuse (2016, top).[1][51] Critics note the work's dedication to repetition, process and linear rhythm, its thickets of fiber, twine, thread, wire and fabric in clashing commercial color defining form, texture and space;[1][35][53] they have been deemed "visual piñatas" and likened to the disparate work of artists El Anatsui, Claes Oldenberg, and Judith Scott.[53] Christopher Miles noted Couzens's conversion of line into form as a tool capable of expressing humor, idiosyncrasy, or vulnerability. He wrote that in their cobbled-together, imprecise method—part bricoleur, part gestural expressionist—they call to mind "a sense of scavenged subsistence […] frailty and vulnerability," yet also communicate "a vibrance, and a stirring pathos."[2]

In 2017, Couzens exhibited Last Words,[54] a 2,500-square foot, mixed-media installation at Sacramento State University.[55] It combined elements of previous work—networks, scrims, commonplace objects, and stitched and wrapped elements that form text—to pay tribute in loosely connected "stations" to people's droll, inconsequential, and sometimes heartbreaking last words, which she solicited and culled from history.[55][3]

Collections and awards

Couzens's work is in many public and private collections, including those of the Crocker Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,[19] Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,[20] Weatherspoon Art Museum,[56] Oakland Museum of California, Butler Institute of American Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery,[57] and Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, among others.[12] She has been recognized with a Publication Fellowship from Peripheral Vision Press (2018), visual artist fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation[58] and Art Matters (both 1995), and an artist-in residency at the Roswell Museum and Art Center (1994).[59][60][12]

References
  1. Pritikin, Renny. "Veiny, Nesty, Whorly, Maidment," Julia Couzens: Maidment, Turlock, CA: California State University, Stanislaus, University Gallery, 2009.
  2. Miles, Christopher. "All In the Lines," String Theory, Huntington Beach CA: Huntington Beach Art Center, 2011.
  3. Roth, David. "Julia Couzens @ Sac State & JayJay," SquareCylinder, October 1, 2017. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  4. Roth, David. "Digging for China (Still)," Strange Fascination, Sacramento CA: Center for Contemporary Art, 2005.
  5. Scarborough, James. "Julia Couzens at Christopher Grimes," Flash Art, May 1994.
  6. Zellen, Jody, "Promenade a Santa Monica," Artpress, April 1995.
  7. Dalkey, Victoria, "Julia Couzens' Inner Outwardness," Sacramento Bee, November 14, 1999.
  8. Openshaw-Shackelford, Penelope L. "Intention, Meaning and Assimilation in the Art of Julia Couzens," ArtMuse, Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, Winter 1999.
  9. Dalkey, Victoria, "Julia Couzens: A Body of Work," Sacramento Bee, June 4, 1995, Encore, p.15–6.
  10. Guenther, Bruce, 1997 Biennial, Catalogue, Newport Beach CA: Orange County Museum of Art, 1997.
  11. Pritikin, Renny. "Hauntology," Art Practical, July-August 2010.
  12. California State University, Stanislaus. Julia Couzens: Maidment, Turlock, CA: California State University, Stanislaus, University Gallery, 2009.
  13. Pagel, David. "Dry Indeed," Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1997.
  14. Baker, Kenneth. "Couzens and Barnes," San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 1987.
  15. Wilk, Deborah. "Left of Center," New Art Examiner, March 1996.
  16. Frank, Peter. "Vital Signs, Art Pick of the Week," LA Weekly, October 30, 1995.
  17. Damianovic, Maia. "Fantasy," Tema Celeste, Winter, 1995.
  18. Forrest, Jason. "Gross Exaggeration," Art Papers, September/October 1997.
  19. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Julia Couzens, Bloodline No. 7, Collection. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  20. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Julia Couzens, Being Exposed #41, Collection. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  21. Couzens, Julia. " Two galleries showcase the ethereal, mesmerizing work of Christine Hodgins," The Sacramento Bee, September 20, 2018. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  22. Couzens, Julia. "Robert Hudson + Ed Moses @ Brian Gross," Squarecylinder, October 3, 2018. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  23. Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. Julia Couzens, Programs, Public Art. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  24. Burgess, Diana Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (eds). Art/Women/California: Parallels and Intersections 1950-2000, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002.
  25. Belt, Debra, "Breathing Space," Sacramento Bee, September 6, 1992. p. 9, 13.
  26. Kandel, Susan, "Psychological Space: Julia Couzens," Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1993.
  27. VoyageMIA. "Check out Julia Couzens' Artwork," Interview, VoyageMIA, July 12, 2018. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  28. Dalkey, Victoria. "Unraveling the Threads of Life," Sacramento Bee, October 26, 2003.
  29. Milman, Barbara. "An Interview with Julia Couzens", dav.art NELSON ART friends, Fall 1999.
  30. Roth, David. "Julia Couzens at CCA," Artweek, March 2006.
  31. Moyle, Marilyn. "The Place in Question," The Davis Enterprise, November 19, 1999.
  32. Miles, Christopher. "'Dry' at Miller Fine Art," Artweek, October 1997, Vol. 28, No. 10.
  33. Roth, David. "A Story of the Eye," Artweek, October 6, 1994.
  34. Wilbur, Debra. Gross Exaggeration: The Work of Julia Couzens and Sarah Whipple, Atlanta GA: City Gallery at Chastain, 1997.
  35. Dalkey, Victoria. "Nature's Tatting: Julia Couzens's Exploration of Line," Maidment, University Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus, 2009.
  36. Julia Couzens. "Mortal Lessons" 1990-1995, Works on Paper. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  37. Anderson, Michael. Julia Couzens, Ab Ovo (From the Beginning): Drawings, University of Nevada Las Vegas: Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, 1993.
  38. O'Brien, Elaine. "Julia Couzens: Mélusine After the Cry," Body and Soul 2000, Edinburgh: Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, April 2000.
  39. Driesbach, Janice. "Experience into Art," Experience into Art: The Crocker Invitational, Catalogue, Sacramento, CA: Crocker Art Museum, 1995.
  40. Julia Couzens. "Watercolors 1994-1999, Works on Paper. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  41. Pelken, Matt. "Charcoal drawings delve into issues of humanity," Daily Republic, March 2, 1994, p. C6.
  42. Crosby, Gregory. Review of "Beauty Is the Beast," SCOPE, (Las Vegas), June 14–July 4, 1997.
  43. Julia Couzens. "Globules" 1995-1999, Recent Work. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  44. Curtis, Cathy. "Vertical Inclinations," Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1996.
  45. Blaschy, Barbara, "Geek Love," Orange County Weekly, September 20-26, 1996.
  46. DiMichele, David. "Vital Signs," Artweek, December 1995.
  47. Becker, Lisa Tamiris.Julia Couzens: Net Work, Claremont CA: The Claremont Graduate School, 2003.
  48. Muchnic, Suzanne. "Fancies," The Davis Enterprise, November 6, 2003.
  49. Julia Couzens. "Net Work," 2003, Exhibitions. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  50. Julia Couzens. "Tape Drawings" 2003-present, Works on Paper. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  51. DiAngelo, Darlene. "Curator's Statement," String Theory, Huntington Beach CA: Huntington Beach Art Center, 2011.
  52. Julia Couzens. "Bundles" 2009-2013, Recent Work. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  53. Pritikin, Renny. " External Combustion: Four Sacramento Sculptors," External Combustion: Four Sacramento Sculptors, Napa, CA: di Rosa Prserve, 2013.
  54. Julia Couzens. "Last Words," 2017, Exhibitions. Retrieved March 14. 2019.
  55. Dalkey, Victoria. "‘Last Words' among two poignant Julia Couzens art shows," Sacramento Bee, September 25, 2017.
  56. Greensboro News & Record, "Weatherspoon Art Gallery Buys Art on Paper Works," Greensboro News & Record, December 7, 1996. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  57. The Yale University Art Gallery. Julia Couzens, Bloodline, Collections. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  58. Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Fellowships in the Visual Arts. Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, 1995.
  59. Peripheral Vision Arts. " Salon 2018 Fellowship Awards." Retrieved March 7. 2019.
  60. Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation. Alumni. Retrieved March 7. 2019.
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