Josie Osborne

medium: mixed media

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Triptych (sing/singe) 2003 Graphic art	Triptych (lost legend) 2003 Graphic art	Closed Altar (mechanics of elevation) 2005 Graphic art
Closed Altar (lucky strike) 2005 Graphic art	Mechanics of Transition 2005 Sculpture	Contemplating Infinity from a Corporeal Perspective 2005 Sculpture
Those Who Know Her 2002 Sculpture	This 2 2002 Sculpture	Thoughts of Sky (Emily's Susan) 2002 Sculpture
Devilish Words (optimistic non-believer finds devilish words on dictionary page) 2005 Sculpture

Contact information
3155 N. Humboldt Blvd.
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Phone Number: 414-963-1996
Email Address: osbornem@uwm.edu
Web site: www.josieosborne.com

Artist statement
Lacan's views on loss, longing and desire have lent language to more clearly describe my own experience and that which I have been comforted in realizing as an integral part of our human condition. This concept as both private experience and shared awareness has been infused into my work for many years, long before reading Lacan. I believe that this is what often drives creative work. Darkness is not obliterated or ignored, but rather reshaped into beauty or a revelatory offering, chaos transformed into some semblance of fragile order. An awareness exists of the space between things that is charged with a desire to be connected. The bird imagery that has been present in both my prints and boxes offers an analogy to that within us, which is fragile and timeless--the intuitive, child-like side of our existence that is increasingly difficult to access as life becomes more fast-paced and complex. I also love the written word, found text and poetry. Certain poetry has the ability to bring the everyday together with the abstract, intangible and even spiritual. Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman and others have lent me words, providing a stepping-off point for my work. In my assemblage boxes, the elements used and the organization or treatment of space references dreams, architecture, the weight of emotions or the diagramming of the imagined mechanics behind something like the change of seasons or astrological movements. They place the necessary openness to non-physical possibility in parallel to that which we physically experience in the world.

Biography
Josie Osborne is a mixed media artist and printmaker living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is Director of Foundations and teaches in the Department of Art and Design, Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Prior to that she was at? Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. She exhibits her work regionally and nationally and is in many private collections. She received her M.F.A. in graphics (printmaking) from UW-Madison in 1998 and has a B.A. in art history and criticism and a B.F.A. in drawing and painting from UW-Milwaukee.??