Joyce Kozloff: DC Moore

Joyce Kozloff's "Boys' Art" is a series of twenty-four collaged drawings based upon maps, diagrams, and illustrations of for the greatest part obscure historic battles. In these works diminutive figures in Napoleonic, Meso-American, Arabian, Mongolian, and superhero regalia preen swell sneak, march, and clash in colorful, lushly detailed landscapes that recall single of Kozloff's acknowledged influences, Henry Darger. plenteous of the allure of these drawings stipes from the pursedlipped schoolboy earnestness with which they present the appearance to have been executed, while the complexity of each work--the minute formations preparing to square not on in Boys' Art #24: Siege of Antibes, 1592 2003 for example, or the battalions of horses and elephants charging into chaos in Boys' Art #8: Battle of Panipat, 1739 2003--suggest an aesthetic meditation parallel in its intensity to the faculty of perception of portent that must have underscored the battles themselves.

If Kozloff is critiquing war and the impulses that lead to it, it's not without an appreciation for the appeal of martial conflict. on the contrary her tendency to always be more Victorian (read: quaint) than medieval (read: grim) mirrors a nostalgia for a time when battles were fought by means of well-styled soldiers in exotic locales, and, overall, our fatal disconnect from the increasing reality of war.

Three large works clearly announce Kozloff's dismay at the persistence of magical thinking, one as well as the other in war itself and in the link between war and economic, military, and technological prowess. In Dark and Light Continents, 2002 a contemporary satellite photo of the earth at night is reproduc upon the twelve adjacent gores of a globe. The amount of light emanating from each area of the planet is linked to its affluence and its access to resources, thus that the piece is an index of that which each bright expanse exacts from the populations in the dark.

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In Spheres of Influence, 2001 another large work in the same format, Kozloff depicts heavily populated areas around the Mediterranean during Greco-Roman times. Dotting these bright pastel maps, however, are emblems of American tactical pilotage charts (some of these bands are still contested). Suggesting that the US is another Rome isn't novel But reiterating the existence of American imperialism in clear visual metes from within our historical flash is a rare breath of novel air.

The exhibition also features a cradle papered with an antique map of Mesopotamia and diagrams of the American invasion of Baghdad in spring 2003 A sign entreatys the viewer to rock the cradle and full the pun: I rock (Iraq) the cradle of civilization. Positioned alongside drawings that hint at the fact that war is always marketed (starting with young males), the plastic art also speaks to the paternalism and hubris with which we treat the quiet of the world. In the extremity Kozloff's critique is deft, flat sympathetic. She illustrates a vision of conflict as vital as it is capricious, all the more magnetic for the fact that we can no longer afford it.

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