About
Through a range of photographic media Karlic creates work that widely addresses the intersection of photography and documentary practices, with a focus on systems of labor and industry, globalization, and their impact on the social and environmental landscapes. Karlic has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cultural Exchange International Fellowship of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Fellowship, the Hellman Fellowship, the Sacatar Foundation Residency Program, and Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program, amongst others. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, Juxtapoz Magazine, Society of Photographic Education, IMA Japanese Magazine, Marie Claire UK, and others.
Her research is dedicated to telling the stories of those persons and ecologies who have been affected by the post-modernization of the industrial world. Through the use of documentary art practice as a research method rather than an artistic style, her work seeks to better understand societal, environmental, and industrial constructs by critically making visual notes of them. Karlic invites the viewer into a space and environment where historical consciousness is critical to reflecting on our relationship to consumption by questioning photography’s limitations, engaging contemporary concerns around the social impact of art, and elaborating on the distinctions between art and lived experience.
In her research, Rubberlands, a photographic survey that maps the ways natural rubber manufacturing is socially, ecologically and systemically formed, Karlic proposes that rubber + photography are both integral components of the second phase of the industrial revolution. This research proposes that each are equal players in the development of a globalized contemporary mobile society of making and consuming.
Karolina Karlic is the founder of, Unseen California, a research initiative that serves as a centralizing hub for arts+science+humanities research that aims to build upon and extend faculty led arts research, education and student work in outdoor California classroom laboratories across the UC Natural Reserve System through an interdisciplinary arts approach to visualizing the environmental and social concerns of the California Landscape in the 21st Century.
Education:
M.F.A., Photography and Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts
B.F.A., Photography, Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Affiliations:
Environmental Art + Social Practice M.F.A. Program, Art Department UCSC
Social Documentation M.F.A. Program, Film and Digital Media Department UCSC
Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History
Research Interests:
Photography as Critical Practice, Documentary Practice, Environmental Engagement, Arts + Sciences, Social Practice, Archival Research.
Selected Honors and Awards:
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011, Creative Arts, Photography
Hellman Fellowship
Cultural Exchange International Fellowship, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles
Artist in Residence: Sacatar Foundation, Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil
Artist in Residence: Light Work, Syracuse, New York
photograph by Mark Amarillo McKnight
Karlic was born in Wrocław, Poland in 1983 and immigrated to Detroit, Michigan in 1987. She holds a M.F.A. (2010) from the California Institute of the Arts, CALARTS, where she studied with Allan Sekula, Harry Gamboa Jr., Ashely Hunt, David Burn, Ellen Birrell, and Andrew Freeman. From 2013-2016 she assisted with the organization of her late mentor’s studio archive (Sekula) in preparation for a Getty Research Institute acquisition. Karlic holds a B.F.A. (2005) from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MCAD, where she studied with Katherine Turczan, Vince Leo, David Goldes, and Alec Soth.
She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the head of the Photography at UCSC and serves as faculty in the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA program.