M+B is pleased to announce Mirror Window Door, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Kara Joslyn. This is Joslyn’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will run from September 18 through October 16, 2021.
In Mirror Window Door, Joslyn expands on her atlas of figures and spaces that merge the symbolic with the real. Primarily sourced from mid-century instructional booklets for making paper figurines, her enigmatic subjects remain anchored to forms in the material world. Through Joslyn’s deft rendering of surfaces, the folded, creased, and curved sheets of paper assume a metaphysical dimension while conveying the wonder of observable reality. The paintings capture the journey to a parallel plane of reality, where figures defy any straightforward interpretation.
Kara Joslyn’s work takes, as its central theme, the idea of storytelling and image-making. The eye plays itself, cast as trickster-redeemer, capturing the unexpected and unfolding the strangeness of things. Figures emerge from black backgrounds. Others are drawn in outsized proportions. All done by hand in a precise and laborious airbrush process, Joslyn’s paintings form an atmospheric realm of images that inspire active speculation from the viewer. They are portals into another reality, almost as if one is entering a different state of being. Each painting is its own resonant vignette, and experienced together, they capture an imaginary world that is by turns unsettling and inviting.
