Macrocosmic: Julia Couzens, Brad Miller, and Coleen Sterritt

Tufenkian Fine Arts is pleased to present Macrocosmic: A Selection of Works by Julia Couzens, Brad Miller, and Coleen Sterritt. This group exhibition of sculpture and works on paper, chosen by guest curator Carole Ann Klonarides, will be installed on the 2nd floor of the gallery, presented in tandem with the solo painting and drawing exhibition, Sigrid Burton: Making Light Visible, from September 6th through October 29th, 2022, with an artist reception to be held on Saturday, September, 17th from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

Throughout their careers, these artists have been known for creating works that forge profound and intimate connections with nature. The exhibition’s title “Macrocosmic” refers to a vision where each work is a view into a universe. Taken together, the works showcase multiple perspectives on nature, the body, and space that effectively capture a sense of nature’s infinitude as a source of artistic inspiration and reveal the inner landscapes of the mind.

In his 1994 Flash Art review, writer James Scarborough called Julia Couzens’ work “a contemporary re-working of the Renaissance emblem of Magnum Chaos, a sort of medieval version of the Big Bang, which resembles both an eye and an egg and alludes to both seeing and becoming.” Her Ovid-like biomorphic forms, in addition to resembling eggs and eyes, conger up microscopic cells of the body made visible only after new technologies allowed a way of seeing an infinite universe in the smallest of molecules. 

The ceramic and photographic work of Brad Miller could not be more timely in reflecting today’s multi-faceted and multi-dimensional ways of looking, and inviting a return to nature and meditative close-looking in this moment of chaos. On 14 September 2015 the team at LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, detected these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime for the very first time. Miller’s unique investigation into these unexpected realms of expression is often evidenced in his use of archetypal patterns operative in the Universe and photograms of shadows of bubbles stacking in water. The images produced by light transiting through bubbles, both reflecting and diffracting, capture the beauty of a moment between chaos and order.

There is a particular balance and momentum in the sculptures by Coleen Sterritt. In her 2017 piece in Sculpture Magazine, sculptor Kay Whitney writes “… She also employs the kinds of psychological displacement used by the Surrealists, using chaos and chance to develop logical systems out of happenstance. The formal and highly composed intersect with their antithesis, anti-form, mapping the conflicted and confused state of the world around us.” The same considerations are at play in her collages where combined materials such as ink, pastel, graphite, paper, adhesive and photographic images, present a mash-up of contemporary life.

What is not normally seen is made visible in each of these artists’ macrocosmic investigations.

Julia Couzens (1947) is known for distinct bodies of work in drawing, sculpture, installation, and writing. Since the early 2000’s Couzens’s textile-based constructions have taken shape between the disciplines of craft, painting, and sculpture. She’s been recognized with a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship; an Art Matters Visual Artist Fellowship; and a Roswell Museum and Art Center Artist-in-Residence grant. Couzens has been shown in museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. In 2019 her work was featured in the international Cheongju Contemporary Craft Biennale, South Korea. Notable public collections include the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Butler Institute of American Art; Crocker Art Museum; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis; Oakland Museum of California; Weatherspoon Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery. Couzens received her M.F.A. in 1990 from the University of California, Davis. She currently divides her time between Merritt Island, outside the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg, and Los Angeles.

Brad Miller (1950) is an artist currently working out of his studio in Venice, CA. with an attraction and curiosity for organic forms and a series of repetitions, of being in control and out of control. “I like that area, the dynamic middle ground between order and chaos, not knowing what I am going to get. I think it’s one of the more important things to understand about our universe.” Brad received his MFA from the University of Oregon in 1977. From 1980 thru 1992, Brad worked at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. He served as Executive Director at the Ranch from 1984 thru 1992. Since 1992 Brad has focused on his studio practice. Brad’s work is in numerous museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Renwick Gallery.

Coleen Sterritt (1953) is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her abstract, hybrid sculpture along with works on paper. Her work is included in public and private collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her awards and fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA) in 2007, The J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts /California Community Foundation (1996), Art Matters, Inc. (1994), Roswell Artist-In-Residence (1994), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986).  As a longtime educator, she has influenced a generation of Los Angeles sculptors and in 2019 she received the Outstanding Educator Award from the International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, NJ. Sterritt was born in Morris, Illinois.  She holds a BFA from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and an MFA from Otis College of Art & Design, Los Angeles.