Unnatural Selections: The Artwork of Tiffany Bozic

Description

One of the most talented artists of her - or any other - generation, Tiffany Bozic combines a deep love of nature and the diversity of life with a self-taught technical prowess that is unmatched. Her long anticipated follow up to Drawn by Instinct, Unnatural Selections chronicles the period from the birth of her daughter in 2012 to the present, exploring new themes such as reproduction, growth, and parenthood alongside her ongoing search for universal commonalities between human beings and other living organisms.

Tiffany Bozic is a self-taught California artist whose work has been described as John James Audubon on acid. Her work evokes the tradition of tightly rendered nature illustration, which she explodes with highly emotional, surreal metaphors. Not so much departing from reality as articulating it more deeply, Bozic makes paintings in which a faun can simultaneously be alive and dead. A population of blackbirds become as one in a perfect sphere of black oil. As nature is ever more subjugated by human impacts, Bozic corrects the balance sheet. She establishes inescapable chains of consequence among the myriad species whose interactions create the world. The work is beautiful, celebratory, but can also be quite difficult. The complexities of natural processes like death and decomposition percolate through pictures of otherwise shining life. Painting on masked and stained maple panels with watered-down acrylic, Bozic summons the grain of the wood into her compositions. With her ornithologist husband and school-aged daughter, Bozic spends significant time in wild places, the rhythms of which are evident in her vision. The subject of several solo exhibitions and included in many group shows across the country, Bozic is in the forefront of artists today redefining the aesthetics and imperatives of global change. Her work has been collected in two books, both published by Gingko Press: Drawn By Instinct (2012) and Unnatural Selection (2019).

"Bozic has spent a career illuminating and delicately painting animals and nature in an original hybrid that has both the scientific accuracy and almost storybook narrative that is both approachable and abstract... as a viewer, you not only get mesmerized by the animals and settings, but you begin to feel an urgency to not only hold onto these environments in real life, but just how connected you start to become wanting to save the planet. That magical feeling as a child becomes a beloved desperation to maintain our connection to Mother Nature." - Juxtapoz "The natural world gets an unusual interpretation through the lens of Northern California-based painter Tiffany Bozic. She combines a highly developed realism with surreal juxtapositions of animals and plants in carefully composed paintings that question the 'natural order' of the environment." - Colossal