Julia Couzens

• November 2 - December 18, 2009
• Reception: November 5 at 5:30 pm
• Artist Talk: 6:00 pm

The University Art Gallery, College of the Arts. CSU Stanislaus will present a group of new works by the nationally recognized Northern California artist Julia Couzens. Couzens’ work of the past twenty years primarily consists of large and small scale drawings and hybrid objects that involve elements of both painting and sculpture. Using everyday materials such as wire, tape, rope, plastic baskets, yarn and thread, Couzens’ obsessively turns these materials into large-scale works suggesting webs, nests, textiles, and the root-like nature of things.

Couzens describes her method of working as "the occupation of hands and thoughts married to a single, repetitive, focused moment … An attempt to break the process down to the incremental, elemental level, to prevent seeing the whole picture and the preconceived notion of what the piece is, or is to become. The object is described by its own determination, discovering what it is, inch by inch, and how it reveals itself without my shaping, mediating, or second-guessing.."

Couzens will also be showing a series of drawings fabricated from tape on vellum. These innovative drawings are comprised entirely of layered fragments, bits, and sections which refer to 18th Century tapestry, fingerprints, man-made structures, and the unpredictable restructuring of a digital aesthetic.

Couzens work is widely shown and selected public collections include the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; Butler Institute of American Art; Crocker Art Museum; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, North Carolina; and Yale University. Her work has been recognized with a visual artist fellowship from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York and Art Matters, New York. She received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1990. She currently lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg, California.