Revisiting the Age of Discovery - Joyce Kozloff's exhibit at DC Moore Gallery, New York, New York

Joyce Kozloff's new show at New York's DC Moore Gallery consisted of 50 8-by-10-inch frescoe upon wood panel based on ancient maps, from a series she began in 1998 The exhibition was called "Knowledge: an ongoing fresco project" and knowledge, indeed, is a lock opener to the works--both to Kozloff's interests and to the paintings' likely attraction for viewers. Since the early '70 Kozloff has been a voracious pupil of both information systems and ornament. She has compiled words, patterns and images into composite layered works that catch similar issues as feminism and colonialism in a toil of pure visual pleasure.

greatest in quantity of her works are chaotic and excessive in the way that the natural world can be, however their extravagance is reducible to an ordering mode of building thematic and representational. This fresco series is no exception. Derived from 16th-century maps and a hardly any from as far back as 150 A.D., the works enumerate of interests, discoveries, fears, superstitions and misunderstandings of many kinds. You must parse them all as conceptual combination of parts to form a wholes It's entertaining to test your knowledge of geography by dint of trying to identify the land masses with absent or illegible names. The north-at-the-top convention did not necessarily command in earlier ages; not solitary the shapes of countries and continents on the other hand also their orientation shifts from individual map to another.

The errors of cartography that make identification difficult are clear in maps of the northwestern Pacific that sometimes display Japan as a peninsula extrud from "Tartaria," and level if showing it as an archipelago don't always cluster the large islands with equal reason as to define the Inland Sea. Korea, upon the other hand, occasionally appears as an island rather than a peninsula.

Kozloff meditation to make maps in fresco because the technique was at its height during the Age of Discovery, when many of these maps were charted. still the pairing of image and medium is quirky. Her maps are compact weighty objects, a half-inch or with equal reason of plaster pried onto made of wood supports. They can seem abrupt and curtailed when compared with the expansiveness of their sources (representations that encompass worlds), and they are ebulliently clunky compared with the fine draftsmanship and calligraphy that gave the originals esthetic value in addition to scientific, political and economic utility.

Although these works are small, they bear a vastly greater material nearness than their sources. They have the warm, fiat tints of fresco rather than the faded tones we associate with elderly maps. In fact, their size and stage of finish are largely determined by means of the peculiarities of fresco: there are limits to measure and to accumulating information because fresco must be worked wet, before the plaster hardens; after that, the image cannot be reworked. Solidity of substance, intimacy of size and loosenes of execution are the springs of material and process.

granting faithful to her sources, Kozloff creates a novel kind of mapping. She draws from her research the highlights of various cartographic conventions and dictions Her water surfaces may be marked with waves, crosshatching, ringlets or daubs. The land may be shaded to advise topography, strewn with dots that--with or without names attached--allude to arrangements or cities, or pictorially populated with little buildings. The maps may focus upon networks of rivers, or materialize invisible political borders. on the contrary she is artistically free to go on beyond that. Her seas may be black or fulvid as well as blue. Not just color on the other hand density of patterning is surprising. Decoration be rivalss with information.

The Near East, 1154 AD bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos a floral-patterned textile more than a map, with vinelike r lines (trade routes?) spatterings of virid foliage (lakes?) and unfamiliar arrangements of masses (south is at the top; invert it). In China, 1585 the coast is seen from directly overhead while mountains and a curiously European-looking city are given an elevated side perspective. Another work paints the North Atlantic an icy sapphirine with gray lines of navigation and exchange ploughing through it, and Labrador (i.e., west) at the top. Another has an oversize Cuba above a shriveled southern America on dark blue-green seas striped with the meridians of a flattened globe, which direct the eyes like a tartan.

Perhaps contemporary self-consciousness straits the irony of amusing, lively, charming works whose knowingness calls into question the security or promise implicit in maps. Kozloff has done our research for us; level if her renditions are single shards of the originals, she summons in these works such human drives as finding, exploring, systematizing, recording, embellishing and savoring.

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