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In this restless and inventive, thoroughly mixed media exhibition, "A Mouth That Might Sing," Mrozowski presents sculptural assemblages, collages, drawings, paintings, a collage-style film, and various defaced found images. But the artist's diversity of materials and concepts here is admirable rather than scattershot, and the work draws from a dissimilar body of inspirations. For the book-based works, Mrozowski found single pages with text and images on both sides and suspended those pages in front of a bright light to create what the viewer sees as a ready-made collage. The conceit owes a bit to photographic works by Robert Heinecken, though they're quite different in style, presentation, and content (Mrozowski favors weathered books that reprint images of older artworks, as opposed to Heinecken's focus on advertising and magazines). There are also two- or three- element collages that depend on visual puns and resemblances, often a juxtaposition of human and nonhuman, as in a small photograph of an anonymous man above an upside-down image of a goat wearing a similar expression, culled from a 1962 World Book Encyclopedia. Mrozowski's concerted lack of focus is admirable and rare.

Yet there are moments of peculiar connection between the disparate mediums, some involving animals. For instance, a six-legged horse in a graphite drawing; a diptych in which each image represents a bird and its reflection in a mirror rendered in gouache and displayed within oddly canted frame; a perfect little acrylic painting, BBiirrdd, 2012, that captures the sensation of observing an owl under the double-vision influence of extreme drunkenness; an oil painting of a dog in which parts of the animal have been removed and replaced by the background sky. Another set of paintings depicts audiences in auditoriums, mainly seen from behind, without any indication of what they're there to see: A poetry reading? A Tea Party rally? In technique and a general vibe of anonymity, these recall painter Michael Borremans, another adept at making the ordinary seem just a bit off.

Given young artists' typical drive to find their niche and work it until it's exhausted, meanwhile hoping to come up with some distinctive brand or fingerprint, Mrozowski's willingness to meander is refreshing. Charlene von Heyl once remarked that, given her lack of a recognizable signature style, critics would say she "was basically just doing group shows" instead of solo exhibitions. The same apparent criticism - really a compliment in a different light- applies here.
- Scott Indrisek, via Modern Painters July 2012
Running on Cargo