Artist Profile - Karen Koziol Artist Profile - Karen Koziol

The art show entitled, “Seeming Possible,” featuring the work of assemblage artist, Karen Koziol, just closed yesterday. If you are someone like myself, who got used to being able to walk over to the Valley Artisans Market to delight in a whole room full of her work, and are sad to see the show finish, perhaps this post will help cheer you. For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of encountering her work, here is a small introduction to a unique and prolific area artist.


Koziol makes art using discarded materials and items she finds at flea markets and antique shops. Her eye for beauty, grace and form, and her mind for an edgy narrative, merge to create some of the quirkiest, and finest, artworks around. Her work is not only visually interesting, at times stunning, it also incites thought in the way items are juxtaposed. The historical relevance of an item as symbol of a bygone day, plays against the way time itself, and environment, have altered it, creating wonderful, ironic visual and physical metaphors. These images illuminate personal and cultural assumptions on the meanings of things.

Although there is no mistaken the influence of Joseph Cornell’s boxes in her work, Koziol removes the glass that separates viewer from artwork and invites you into the piece. Allowing a more intimate and personal connection with the symbols and form confronting you. There is also the sense of play and humor that is brought to her work, in an intelligence that allows us to take a deeper look into the discarded pieces of our human condition and be able to laugh, often out loud, at ourselves in that reflection.


You can view and purchase a small collection of Koziol’s artworks at the Valley Artisans Market, a cooperative gallery of the fine art and crafts of area artists located at Hubbard Hall at 25 East Main Street. For more information and to contact the artist, call 518-677-2765.