Lake Fong, Post-Gazette "Bodies of Water: Cities of China" is one of a number of works by Joyce Kozloff that have their genesis in map-making.

By Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, are two very different exhibits, unified by their political content and by activist artist Joyce Kozloff who will give a free talk at 5:30 p.m. Friday at the gallery.

"Disarming Images" is an engaging, hour-long, three screen video work made under the sponsorship of the New York-based collective Artists Against the War, of which Kozloff is a member. It includes video and photographic images of Americans publicly protesting what is referred to as the U.S. "invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq."

The images were made between 2001 and 2005 and were culled by artists Elaine Angelopoulos, Debra Werblud and Carole Ashley from a variety of sources. An impetus for the project was the artists' feeling that mainstream media wasn't covering such protests in proportion to their passion and frequency. Ann Messner, creative director of "Disarming Images," will speak along with Kozloff, about political response and the role of artists as activists.

If the video piece is graphic, direct and of the moment, the work in "Joyce Kozloff: Exterior and Interior Cartographies" is lyrical, esoteric and undesignated to time and place. And while, as the title implies, there is underlying content, her work is also unself-consciously beautiful.

That description might offend some artists, but not Kozloff who in the 1970s was part of the Pattern and Decoration movement, paddling against the reductive current of minimalism. Having earned her B.F.A. from then Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1964, and a subsequent M.F.A. from Columbia University, Kozloff returns to her alma mater a heralded artist who's secured several public art commissions including at the United States Consulate in Istanbul and National Airport, Washington, D.C.

She's also represented in such collections as those of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the National Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

At the Miller, Kozloff exhibits works from a number of series that have their genesis in mapmaking, receiving inspiration from their basic formal qualities as well as from all of the socio-cultural implications thereof. Places ancient, contemporary or imagined -- drawn representationally or re-configured -- are cryptically encoded to reference the effects of man's movements through history, as by the slave trade or war.

The results are political, conceptual and, foremostly, aesthetically captivating objects.

If maps are understood as symbolic of a structured cosmology -- a framework for understanding the world -- Kozloff is interested in the classification, de-classification and re-classification of those guidelines in order to effect dialogue and, with luck, change.

Nine works from the 2004 "American History" series, for example, include "Going Global" which shows a world encircled by rows of tiny troops, tanks entering from all sides of the frame.

The astute "Boys' Art" series combines meticulously drawn graphite maps with found images from art history and media, and drawings made by Kozloff's son, Nik, when young. The images are reduced by Xeroxing to accommodate the scale of the works.

In #19, "Skagerrak," Kozloff also reproduces the identifying label of the historic map, "North Sea Skagerrak, from the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish Charts," as well as archivist's stamps with departmental information and where to return the "original document." Scattered about its surface are soldier and police images from what appear to be comics, and chains of the late self-taught artist Henry Darger's Vivian Girls along with members of the armies they fought.

In #9, "Iwo Jima," Kozloff surrounds the island with members of the Continental Army and Native Americans, perhaps presaging the later battle, mingled with images of aircraft carriers and her son's airplanes. In #12, "Foreign Occupation Sacramento," the mission-era town is infiltrated by rifle-carrying men in Arab headgear and robes.

Beyond the obvious associations in these works, Kozloff, who was also active in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, suggests a parallel between the propensity towards violent imagining in young boys and the actualization of those fantasies in adulthood.

Kozloff fares less well in three dimensions. "Rocking the Cradle," a wooden baby cradle painted inside with a map of Babylon and the Euphrates River overlain with military campaign arrows is effective but a one-liner. And a series of painted globes lacks the ideological weight of earlier works by the late Croatian artist Mangelos which Kozloff's call to mind.

The very scope of Kozloff's expression is evidence of the prevalence of the map model in constructing the structures -- national, philosophical, religious -- that guide, perhaps rule, our daily lives. That in itself is reason to pay attention to the kinds of relationships that Kozloff explores and reveals.

The exhibits continue through Oct. 15. The gallery is located in the Purnell Center for the Arts. Admission is free. Hours are 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. For information, call 412-268-3618 or visit www.cmu.edu/millergallery.