Bodies of Water 1997

Joyce Kozloff made "Bodies of Water" with a map and some imaginative ink work. It’s like she dove right into cartography and came up with a whole new world. Look at how the watery blues meet the sandy yellows, all sectioned off like a puzzle, but then, BAM! there are these delicate, almost scientific drawings layered on top. It’s like the map is the foundation, but the real story is in those floating anatomical sketches. Notice the sinuous lines suggesting veins or rivers, and then these more rigid geometric lines which intersect them like the co-ordinates of the map itself. It makes me think about how we try to chart and understand everything, even our own bodies, as though we can fully know them. But maybe there’s always going to be this beautiful, messy, unknown territory in there too, just like in Kozloff's piece. "Bodies of Water" reminds me a little of Nancy Graves' cartographic experiments, where she combines abstraction with factual geography. Art like this is an invitation to get lost in thought, where ambiguity is the destination, not the detour.