Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Confiding to Strangers, an exhibition of new paintings by the San Francisco-based artist Tiffany Bozic. This is Bozic’s debut solo show at Joshua Liner.

Spanning the gallery’s two exhibition areas, Confiding to Strangers features twelve medium-sized works in acrylic on maple-wood panel and eighteen watercolor-on-paper works. All showcase Bozic’s meticulous, realist rendering of plant and animal subjects that recasts nature as fable. “Each painting is about the intimate struggles we share with other living creatures,” says Bozic. “I use examples from nature to help me describe these increasingly complex emotions, expanding my own metaphorical language. These works are small reminders that we are nature; connected to everything.”

Some of these intimate connections express harmony in existence, such as the pair of sugar gliders spooning in a nest of dogwood blossoms depicted in Oxytocin (a witty reference to the “cuddle hormone” of breastfeeding and maternal bonding). Other works suggest life’s inherent competition, such as Eat or Be Eaten, a tangle of frogs and bats consuming each other amid a bright bouquet of irises and gerberas. Still other works are more explicitly metaphorical though no less immediate, such as the mysterious Under My Skin, showing a welter of desert animals (armadillos, beetles, thorny devils) submerged below a landscape of parched earth, one lone dandelion pushing through like a hair from a follicle.

Self-taught, Bozic and her wide array of subjects are inspired by the artist’s extensive travels to wild places, as well as her study of research specimens at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. In her practice, Bozic has developed a complex process of masking and staining the maple panels she paints on, thus collaborating with the wood’s natural grain as she builds up compositions with thin layers of acrylic. Her work has the traditional air of Flemish still-life painting or tightly rendered illustrations, displaying a highly emotional range of fabulist themes.

Born in 1979 in Russellville, Arkansas, Tiffany Bozic currently lives and works in San Francisco. Solo exhibitions of her work include: Symmetrical Balance: Tiffany Bozic, Fecal Face Dot Gallery, San Francisco, and Bedtime Stories, Kinsey/DesForges Gallery, Culver City, CA (both 2008); From the Depths (inaugural Artist-in-Residence), California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (2007); and New Paintings and Works on Paper, BLK/MRKT Gallery, Culver City (2006). Selected group exhibitions include: Fecal Face 10 Year Anniversary, Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (2010); In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA (2008); Queen of the Night, Women Under the Influence 1963–2006, Berman Turner Projects, Los Angeles (2006); and Art Into Action, Natural World Museum/World Environment Day, Fort Mason, San Francisco (2005).