Tiffany Bozic’s take on the natural world, and her methods for realizing it, is in extreme counterpoint to Kim Dorland’s. Whereas Dorland represents a variant of "extreme painting," with massive panels supporting thousands of tubes of paint and weighing up to 300 pounds, Bozic's application of paint is watery, thin and translucent, revealing the grain of the maple panel. Instead of a soundtrack of Slayer, with Tiffany Bozic's work, you should be hearing Kate Bush.
Bozic, a San Francisco-based artist and Fecal Face darling, is known for her detailed renderings of delicate organisms: plants, flowers, small animals, and human organs arranged in a way to evoke complex emotional responses. Bozic is truly gifted in draftsmanship. Each line is precisely placed, naturalistically, like a Victorian-era botanical guide—making the incongruities all the more resonant. A group of bats and frogs battle and swallow each other amongst a beautiful bouquet of Gerber daisies. A tiny skunk curls up inside the petals of a white rose. Five armadillos and various arthropods huddle together in an underground den, in hiding from a desolate landscape.
Some of her metaphorical constructions border on the pedantic or the precious, and some of the themes may come off as heavy-handed, but the paintings invariably express a magnificent delicacy and elegance in their handling. Allegories enacted by woodland creatures may sound trite, but they are really quite exquisite, like modern-day fables. Those depicting human figures linked with intertwining tendrils of veins and vines, in their Kahlo-esque flatness, form a personal mythology. All a little bit bizarre, sometimes unsettling, sometimes intimate, wild yet controlled, Bozic's paintings enchant, delight and startle.
(*Images: Tiffany Bozic, White Chalk, acrylic on maple panel, 45 x 35 in. Tiffany Bozic, Succubus, acrylic on maple panel, 38 x 30 in. Tiffany Bozic, Under My Skin, acrylic on maple panel, 42 x 32 in.)