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LIZ LARNER |
Since the mid-1980s, Liz Larner has been making artworks that question widely held assumptions about sculpture. Using unconventional methods and media, she explores issues of volume, density, mass, and color in unique and provocative ways. Larner studied photography at the California Institute of Arts, not turning to sculpture until after graduating in 1985 when she recognized the necessity of realizing artistic ideas in real space. Larner’s acute awareness of the physical world has led to her use of a wide range of contradictory materials and to hone an acute awareness of the viewer’s experience. Her body of work ranges from the small, process-oriented “culture pieces” of the late 1980s made from bacterial growth in Petri dishes to large-scale objects and installations such as this one.
Some of her sculptures occupy and articulate space without volume, most are made from non-traditional materials, and many often use color as a structural element. Corridor, Orange/Blue, 1991, embraces all three of these ideas. Using brightly colored forms placed on the floor and hung from the ceiling, this work is about the relationship of disparate elements to each other and to the viewer. The Gallery space is activated by the interaction of opposites in this piece: the contrast of the bright complimentary colors of orange and blue, the rigid rectangular forms suspended in space versus the growth-like organic shapes that rise from the floor, and the tension between the use of metal and fabric. Larner has created a kind of psychological confrontation as well through the collision of the personal and handcrafted (knitted and woven fabric) with the impersonal and mechanical (metal and automobile paint), perhaps alluding to broader dualities of nature versus culture, emotion versus intellect, or the personal and private versus the public.
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects