Julia Couzens

Julia Couzens (born 1947) is a California-based artist and writer known for drawing, sculpture and installation art that embraces unconventional materials and methods. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Christopher Grimes Gallery and California State University, Stanislaus, surveys at the University of California, Davis and Sonoma Museum of Visual Art (1999), and group shows at the Crocker Art Museum, P•P•O•W (New York), Orange County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and BAMPFA, among others. Her art has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Flash Art, and Art Practical, and collected by the Crocker Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California and Butler Institute of American Art, among many. She lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg and maintains a studio in downtown Los Angeles.

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. 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. 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.

Work

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. Common to them is an intuitive, sometimes "obsessive, hyperactive working process" that resists intellectualization in its investigations of bodily form and being, nature, and matter. Writers have recognized Surrealist Georges Bataille and Symbolist Odilon Redon as influences in her earlier, body-derived work; 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. while curator Bruce Guenther located its fascination in its hovering between being "seductive and grotesque, abstract and referential." 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. 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," alluding to eyes, breasts and microscopic, coalescing or replicating corpuscles, membranes and cells (e.g., Untitled, 2003). —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," 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. 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). Her show "Net Work" (2003) featured wall pieces whose allusions ranged from eroticism (La Little One) to the figure (Ultra Light) to landscape (Fancy). —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. referencing fingerprints, trees, constellations or fireworks. 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). they have been deemed "visual piñatas" and likened to the disparate work of artists El Anatsui, Claes Oldenberg, and Judith Scott. a mixed-media installation at Sacramento State University. 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. Squarecylinder critic Mark Van Proyen noted the series' unexpected variation, use of double entendre (garment tag and graffiti tagging), and irreverent, often biting feminist critique of art-world sexism and market hype. Oakland Museum of California, Butler Institute of American Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, among others. and Art Matters (both 1995), and an artist-in residency at the Roswell Museum and Art Center (1994).