Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome visual artist Joy Kloman, residing in Oregon, with three mesmerizing paintings. These works explore memory through the use of patterns overlaid on scenes which appear to be painted from old family photographs. Parts of the images, sometimes a face or an entire body, are obscured by these overlaying patterns, often resembling quilting, wallpaper elements, or foliage. This is analogous to distortions in memory, which loses clarity in some places while retaining it in others and is clouded and rewritten by the patterns our mind imposes upon it. Truth is embroidered over time.
“In the work samples of my practice, one is observing foliage and patterns enveloping figures, like peering behind grandmother’s peeling damask wallpaper, revealing a record of those who were once there.”
Mended Memory, a work in oil and gold leaf on torn canvas, shows three children standing proudly next to a bicycle. Two of them are more or less recognizable, while the one on the left is faded almost to a shadow. Did something happen to this child? Was it a cataclysmic event or did they simply fade out of memory? The mind is an unreliable narrator. Joy does a masterful job of making the image complete in its incompleteness–we feel that the image exists in its entirety below the obscuring pattern, and the pattern does not render the image indecipherable, except for the identity of that one child. This is a magical effect.
The next two paintings are inspired by “Song of Myself 6” from Walt Whitman’s classic Leaves of Grass, reprinted in the issue. What is the Grass? is a rendering of a young girl in acrylic. This time the overlaying architectural pattern is less distinct and more like foliage, although it is still present. The girl’s face is once again unclear. The inward angling of her feet makes her appear shy and uncomfortable with the attention she has been given. Who is she and who did she become?
The oil painting Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves reveals a man and a woman in close contact and is completely overrun by foliage, some of it resembling gingko leaves. The overlay is so dense that we can’t tell the context–they could be dancing, talking, embracing, even fighting. The motion implied by the brushstrokes and the way the foliage moves across the figures suggests passion and ferocity. Joy illustrates how the details of our lives and our relationships are lost over time. Gradually these details become invisible even to us, falling past the edges of memory.
“I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,/ And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps/. What do you think has become of the young and old men?/ And what do you think has become of the women and children?” –Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself 6”
View Joy’s captivating artwork in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Joy Kloman is on the Fulbright Specialist Roster, 2025-2028. Kloman was a tenured Associate Professor at University of Mississippi who supervised graduate and undergraduate painting programs. Professor Kloman also taught drawing in London. She earned her MFA from University of Florida and BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. Kloman was awarded a Ford Foundation Career Opportunity Grant, administered by Oregon Arts Commission to attend Hangar Center of Artistic Research Residency in Portugal in 2026.
Her art is in many collections internationally, including: Rothko Museum, Latvia; Art Circle, Slovenia; ExtrArtis, Italy; Viļaka Museum, future Valdis Bušs Art Centre, Latvia; Balatonfüred City Hall, Hungary; Ringling Museum of Art, Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Pensacola Museum of Art, Florida; and Meridian Museum of Art, Mississippi.