Artist Statement

My experience as a construction manager iterated that influence and inspiration could come from any profession or person and from seemingly meaningless materials and objects. My studio is organized around blueprints, cardboard, carpet, binders, tape, paint, and telephones. I am engaged in how people both seek to understand the language of building and create their own language of marks, colors, and notes to humanize their experience. My collages often explore 'childlike' stories, scribbles, and animal characters in order to make sense of adulthood experiences of anxiety, responsibility, and compromise. The animal characters vary from a drawn alligator to comic book versions of humans. Often my strategy is to have the animals embody and interpret a complex human issue such as money, relationships with friends, or television. By engaging with the animals' individual logic and respecting their autonomous identity, we propose an alternative perspective through materials and stories.

Artist Bio

Angelo Kozonis is an artist currently living in Baltimore, Maryland.  He is pursuing a masters degree in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art's Rinehart School of Sculpture.  He was born and raised in Barrington, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago, and did his undergraduate study at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  There he majored in History and Studio Art with a concentration in ceramics and sculpture.

In the years after college, he worked as a construction manager for his family's business, Amcraft Construction.  His duties varied considerably, from supervising the building of office spaces to negotiating yearly maintenance contracts to finding individuals and businesses to recycle 200,000 square feet of used carpet.  He kept his passion for art making alive by creating collages at his office desk at the beginning and end of a day.

His experience working as a construction manager iterated that influence and inspiration could come from any profession or person and from seemingly meaningless materials and objects.  He uses childlike mark making as a way to make sense of adulthood responsibilities and experience.  While at graduate school, Angelo continued his exploration into paper and expanded his artistic process into video making and writing.  His future plans are to stay in Baltimore and become more acclimated to the Baltimore Arts Community.