JOYCE KOROTKIN

“…In the exhibit, “Horizons,” Joyce Korotkin’s work looks to the future. These paintings of imagined landscapes filled with an ethereal beauty, conjure a magical place and time, often attempting to capture the sublime. This work takes a concrete idea of our surroundings, and shows us what they can become through power and the beauty of the world around us...” - Jay Davis, Curator, MSK Bergen Gallery

"ELSEWHERE: Lost Horizons" addresses the widening global disconnect between our disparate cultures and dangerously divisive sets of beliefs that seem to be increasingly on the verge of destroying us all, via what we all share in common - the earth and its inherent beauty, and our natures as sentient beings inhabiting this brief moment together in the continuum of time. "ELSEWHERE: Lost Horizons" seeks to elicit the evanescent moments we all own; those that light the sky and the troubled world below it with moments of peaceful serenity or with a fiery beauty that hangs suspended for but a heartbeat, before disappearing into the jarring uncertainties of tomorrow.

Ruminations: Contemplative studies focusing on the captured moment; that which originates in mood and is intrinsically connected to the passage of time and its inherent, bittersweet loss; musing as well on the elusive places in the heart, mind and soul that comprise the essence of memory. 

TABULA RASA: Landscapes aimed directly at the emotional jugular. Masquerading as classically based landscapes documenting real places, these images are actually inventions culled from the intoxicating ether of sensation, given to reveling in the sensuality of buttery paint and, as well, in the luminosity, translucence and visceral texture of wax. Unabashedly romantic, they are drenched in poetic evocation, lush color and incandescent light. Erased of externally imposed narrative, they afford the viewer's imagination a blank slate in which to dream.

EVOCATIONS: Rife with implication rather than overt statement, and hovering on a barely discernible borderline between abstraction and representation, ''Evocations'' focuses on evoking the intangible sensation of moments; those moments, distilled by light, sound, taste or scent, that trigger subconscious, primal recognition; the sensory impressions that become internalized as the essence of memory.

INCIDENTS & ALLEGATIONS: Landscapes based on scenes from New York's Central Park, in which hidden clues to implied incidents come in and out of focus. Optical flips between positive and negative space cause one to question what is and isn’t there. Infused with a vaguely ominous feeling and a sense of suspended time characterized by dusk, these works are inspired by the Park's ghosts; its layered histories in which the 21st Century is superimposed on the past, and refer to the omnipresent sensation in every corner of the park that things are not quite as they seem. The idyllic landscape bears silent witness to, as well as evidence and traces of, the human dramas that unfold within it.

MIRAGE: Abstracted monochromatic landscapes in which hidden or reversed images come in and out of focus via optical flips between the positive and negative space as either background or foreground. A decorative Victorian bouquet in a vase painted in black on white might contain an alternate image in its negative spaces, that of Macbeth's witches in heated argument, if the viewer's focus shifts to view it as white on black. Kaleidoscopic patterns of leaves and limbs reverse and flip to expose hidden images; and characters emerge from the woods and leaves as they do from our psyches, deeply embedded in our imaginations from childhood fairy tales. These paintings play with the ways in which the mind's eye functions, seeing things that might not be there, such as we see images in the clouds or in the swirling grain of wood. 

GLOBAL WARMING 2°: NY Story circa 21st Century Landscapes forewarning of things to come, in which unnatural changes are subtly hidden or implied within the scenes, bearing witness to the folly of global warming and its deleterious effects on nature. Alligators camouflaged as logs or rocks might be discerned cruising in the distance in a pond, or lurking hungrily by its edge, surrounded by indigenous foliage interspersed with occasional tropical plants; all thriving in New York's Central Park where the current but rapidly changing climate dictates that they do not belong.

CAMEOS: Portraits of Artists and Characters who posed for "Synergistic Adversaries" here make “cameo” or star appearances amidst recognizable motifs from their own work and lives. Portraits of the sitters as well as of their works, they intrinsically wed the creator to the creation; both are portrayed with equal importance.

"Witness" addresses the increasing dichotomy between perception and fact. With instantaneous access to selective media spin and viral social networking, increasingly blurred boundaries undermine the assumed veracity of documentation as primary source becomes inseparable from secondary innuendo. What do we see versus what we think we see? What do we know versus what we think we know? Wherein lies the boundary between?  "Witness" focuses on the eye of the beholder, be it transfixed in the moment of incident, or filtered through disparate lenses of perception. 

SYNERGISTIC ADVERSARIES: Life-sized portraits of art world characters, from emerging to established, that document a cross-section of the New York art world in the dawn of the 21st century. Included are artists, dealers, museum directors, curators, collectors and critics — from those who create art to those who promote, sell, support, document and ultimately preserve it — all of whom are of equal importance within the synergistic but highly competitive circle of the art world. Comprised of individual portraits originated from life sittings, the series as a whole is a portrait of the era. Like a time capsule, it resonates with an essence of the moment in which it was created, but will, as careers evolve and time passes, become redolent with the scent of art history.

Portrait studies from life sittings in oil on canvas and gesso primed Arches paper.

CUT!: Portraits of actors and celebrities, those about whom the media spin has created powerful mythologies - latter-day equivalents of the Greek Gods, turned into chimerical legends to fuel consumerist ends. Characters are portrayed informally, each in his own persona, rather than as a more familiar staged media image. The actors portrayed are those whose work has significantly stamped the era, marked or changed the sensibility of the times, or our perceptions and values within it, as well as those who are capable of expressing in something as simple and yet incredibly complex as a gesture, a fleeting expression, or exquisite timing or phrasing, that which is most universally sublime about being human.

COLLISION: Inspired in part by Joseph Campbell’s ''The Power of Myth'', these works reflect upon dichotomies between the epic mythologies, fairy tales and heroic legends of the past and the consumer driven mythologies of the present that fuel contemporary aspirations and culture.

Evocative landscapes that occupy an exploratory terrain hovering between direct observation and the wilds of imagination. A departure from my stylistically and conceptually cohesive series, these works meander in their own directions; mavericks roaming freely, bouncing between abstraction and representation. Derived from imagination and longing – for beauty, for magic, for enchantment - they are fueled by the sensory moments one experiences, then internalizes as memory, retrievable by sound, scent or an ineffable quality of light. 

Random studies and works that roam freely, bouncing between unified series that characterize my work.