Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. Contested Territories presents a selection of Kozloff’s works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff’s wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

Virtual Reality Experience

A fully immersive virtual reality experience of Kozloff’s newest public artwork, developed by Brooklyn-based MediaCombo, accompanies the exhibition. Using VR headsets, visitors can explore Memory and Time, a series of 17 glass and mosaic tile panels illustrating the history of Greenville’s textile industry, installed at the Carroll A. Campbell Jr. United States Courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina. Kozloff herself narratives the 9-minute experience, guiding visitors through several panels and describing how they represent local history.

Maria Park: Field Diagram

Maria Park’s paintings, installations, and public projects explore how technology shapes perception and affects how we engage with the world around us. Field Diagram traces the ways in which Park’s studio became a site for her to reestablish both a ground and a horizon after the loss of her partner and collaborator Branden Hookway in 2021. Upon returning to their shared studio in Ithaca in 2023 after three years away, Park spent six months rearranging the space so that it would reflect a conversation between her work, Hookway’s work, and their collaborative projects. She could only focus on her own studio practice after establishing this physical diagram.

Park’s mineral paintings—made through a painstaking process of reverse painting on clear acrylic—contain multiple levels of highly personal symbolism. Like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs, Park collects and paints minerals to symbolically mark her family’s path through life. The exhibition presents the diagram as a shifting field, one where lines are continuously drawn and redrawn.

Jake Troyli: Open Season

Jake Troyli’s works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in Open Season, where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

About the Artist:

Jake Troyli (b. 1990, Boston, MA) played Division 1 basketball at Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC before receiving his BFA from Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, TN (2013), and his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa (2019). He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME in 2019. Solo exhibitions include moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2024, 2022); Tempus Projects, Tampa, FL (2018); and ArtsXchange, Atlanta, GA (2018). Troyli’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Perrotin Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Galerie Droste, Düsseldorf, DE (2024); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (2023-24); Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY (2023); Galerie Droste, Paris, FR (2021); The Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL (2021); Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL (2019); San Francisco Art Institute, CA (2018). Troyli’s work is in the permanent collections of the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; Tampa Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and Pierce and Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI. He is the recipient of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2019-2020) and the Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant, Largo, FL (2017). Troyli was a 2023 Visual Artist recipient of the Academy of Fine Arts x International City of Arts program in Paris, France. He is currently an artist in residence at Project for Empty Space in Newark, NJ.

Urban Video Project Featuring LaJuné McMillian & Manuel Molina Martagon

LaJuné McMillian 2025
Duration: tbd

While in residence at Light Work in early 2025, media artists LaJuné McMillian and Manuel Molina Martagon worked with four local community-engaged creatives. Together, they discussed their practices and their visions for a liberated future. The artists asked them to embody their answers not only through words, but through movement as well. The Portal’s Keeper realizes those visions through the technological “portal” of a popular game engine better known for first-person shooter and battle royale MMO games. Here, the artists use this technology not to realistically simulate violence, but instead as a means to abstractly represent the energy we access and emit when we are able to move through the world freely.

This piece was created as part of the UVP Residential Media Arts Commission program.

About the Artists

Manuel Molina Martagon is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video and socially engaged projects. His work explores issues of immigration, labor, tradition, and access. He holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from SVA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Spain, China, Cuba, and at institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Art Museum of the Americas in DC. He is a Fulbright recipient and has been an artist in residence at Recess, Santa Fe Art Institute and Artists Alliance.

LaJuné McMillian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination and making room for different ways of being. McMillian has had the opportunity to show and speak at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art & Code’s “Weird Reality”. They have continued their research during residencies and fellowships at the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NYU ITP, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College. Artist’s page: @_lovelaja

Sponsors

All UVP and Light Work exhibitions are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This project was additionally supported by a NYSCA Support for Artists grant.

All UVP and Light Work programs are made possible with support from County of Onondaga, with the support of County Executive Ryan McMahon and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts.

RELATED EVENTS:

Build Your Own Portal: Motion Capture and Avatar Creation Workshop
Wed | Nov 5 | 6-8 p.m.
Community Folk Art Center

Enter the Portal: Building Liberated Worlds
Th | Nov 6 | 6-8 p.m.
Everson Museum of Art Auditorium

Corpórea Digital: Bilingual Workshop
Sat | Nov 8 | 12-4 p.m.
La Casita Cultural Center | Lincoln Building, 109 Otisco St.