Siding With The Monster

Several decades later she feels some distance. “The whole thing of pop culture, I don’t even see it. It’s just…culture. It’s just real life.” Along with the TV shows from her childhood she gets inspiration from salvaged bits of wood – fashioned into figures, these became the beginning of Blue Boy – and she remembers her Serbian-born father “telling me stories about being chased in the woods by a ghost force,” which calls to mind the recent Australian/Macedonian film You Won’t Be Alone, and seems to haunt some of the work in Wonderland. Her enthusiasm for science fiction’s “messing with other worlds” and horror film’s capacity to “soothe” anxiety is that of a connoisseur. She tells me, “Since I was a kid I always sided with the monster.” She can be an absolute fan as well. At a film screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Kozic gave two of her monster paintings to Nightmare Alley director Guillermo del Toro. She laughs, “I turned into a ten year old girl. My lisp came back. I said ‘I love monthterth’ and he kissed me on the cheek.”

It’s not just mass mediated imagery that draws her. “I find everything interesting,” she says. “I don’t have to do research. Everything seems to be of importance. I was in a bathroom with an automatic soap dispenser and it made such a wonderful sound I recorded it. There’s a joy in things. But then there’s the state of the world that’s distressing.” Responding to this world, often through concurrent series featuring little beings that sometimes look like cartoon figures, is solace. She adds, “When I’m working, everything else goes away.” Wonderland comprises a dozen or so small, domestically-scaled paintings of entities she calls “creatures” inhabiting or passing through a variety of landscapes. “My idea is that the creatures are a stand-in for humans.” These fully formed if undefinable little entities have an uneasy relationship with their surroundings, those varied backgrounds Kozic works up from photographs of local sites and generic landscape paintings from her childhood home. Everything is marked with a kind of post-Covid melancholy; there’s nothing heroic about the creatures. They don’t struggle so much as lurk. All are in a state of anxiety where, as Kozic puts it, “bad stuff is about to happen.”

Little figures fall from orange skies, a pink genderless Ophelia with a scarred tummy floats by – “it hasn’t had a good day.” Apricot sunsets mix “horror and hell”, ectoplasm billows like a viral load over a nocturnal cityscape, and a wee blue munchkin wanders at the end of the earth. Kozic’s creatures are funny and there’s a warmth in her approach that suggests she can feel their pain. At the same time their worlds – generic or malign – are as much in need of repair as this one. She says, “I find everything so ridiculously fucked up, I don’t know why it hasn’t been fixed.”

More than 20 years ago critic Adrian Martin ended his appreciation of Kozic’s work this way: “The art of Maria Kozic…perennially leads its viewers into a new world by way of shocks gentle and violent, provocations exact and disarming, revelations sweet and profound.”