Search results for ""author liz larner""

A long-overdue appreciation of the influential sculpture of Liz Larner and its radically adventurous formal and conceptual vocabulary Los Angeles–based sculptor and installation artist Liz Larner (born 1960) was originally a photographer: in some of her earliest projects, she documented the volatility of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. However, she soon realized that she was more compelled by the dishes themselves and how they presented questions about what an art object can entail. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in formal unpredictability through a focus on sculpture and architectural space. Composed of a diverse variety of materials, her sculptures frequently function as optical illusions that seem to bend the space around them. Sometimes rigidly technical in their geometry and at other times soft-edged and amorphous, Larner’s sculptures are striking both for their fluctuation of form and for their representation of spatial politics. Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner’s artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner’s critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner’s work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.

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Published to coincide with her solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, this catalogue surveys over five years of Los Angeles–based artist Liz Larner's (born 1960) wall-based ceramic works. Larner’s process explores the natural compression and fragmentation of the body and of ceramic forms themselves. Fired and coated with pigment and resin, each ceramic work fits into one of six categories: inflexion, caesura, subduction, mantle, passage and calefaction. Resembling magnificently colored ancient tablets or sculptural specimens of the mineral world, the pieces have fissures and cracks that evoke geological processes. With a photo-essay by Catherine Opie, an essay by curator and writer Jenelle Porter, and an interview between Larner and Aspen Art Museum Director Heidi Zuckerman, this is an accessible entry into the work of an eminent female artist whose practice continues to radically enliven contemporary sculpture.

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