Tiffany Bozic once said that she felt like she was born with a heightened sense that everything is connected. Some of her earliest childhood memories take place on her family’s farm in Arkansas, where she grew up watching animals being born, and also killed in a slaughterhouse. It was a nurturing and also traumatizing experience that continues to affect her art. Bozic’s dream-like paintings of animals at different stages of life have appeared in several Hi-Fructose issues, most recently Vol. 30, and soon our exhibition at Virgina MOCA. Her images are visual metaphors for human and nature’s shared effort to live life fully.
Today, Bozic lives and works on the outskirts of San Francisco, on the edge of a nature preserve. She accompanies her husband, an ornithologist, on many expeditions to remote locations, giving her incredible access to a multitude of natural habitats. When not on expedition, Bozic spends her time researching and working from photographs taken on expedition, lending to an almost scientific quality about her work that recalls naturalist illustrations. At the same time, they are nonsensical, graphic and surreal images that summarize the cycle of birth, growth and decay in a single moment.
For her upcoming solo “The Animal in Us”, opening tomorrow at Joshua Liner Gallery in New York, Bozic explores our shared experience of life with a diversity of animals. Her series of nine new acrylic paintings on canvas blur the line between humans and animals and express what it means to be alive: “In these paintings I am exploring what it means to be animal and human. What do we have in common at the core with all other living mammals? Each painting varies drastically as they each focus on a specific quality. We all struggle to survive, seek shelter and food, have fear, we search for a mate and self identify, and we all die.”
