Liz Larner – As Stars and Seas Entwine

“Plastics… were used in furniture, clothing, containers, appliances, just about everything. Sometimes the poisons leached into food or water and caused cancer, and sometimes there was a fire and plastics burned and gassed people to death…. The only place that has enough of it to be a real danger is right here.” (Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites, 1988)

Regen Projects is pleased to present “As Stars and Seas Entwine”, the eighth solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Liz Larner, whose deep research-based practice is united by a continual exploration of form, material, and color. This exhibition will debut one of the new large-scale floor sculptures and a number of ceramic works that will be included in “Below Above”, a forthcoming museum exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich in the summer of 2022.

The works on view reveal Larner’s acceptance of Posthumanist thought that the Anthropocene induces as the world becomes beleaguered by rapidly depleting resources and the massive waste that accompanies our extractive industries. The large low floor sculpture, a sea foam/meerschaum drift, seems to billow and surge through the space. The undulating form constructed of conjoined plastic refuse was collected by Larner over the course of three years. Serving as a meditation on the pervasive and exponential presence of plastic in the world, the sculpture is at once beautiful and horrible, a complex combination that evokes the pathos of its material. This “Meerschaum Drift”‘s materiality belies its intricate form and supposes a transformation of crude material into an art object. Plastic-derived acrylic paint applied to its surface gives the sculpture the overall sense of movement in color from deep blue to green to white, evoking the ephemeral quality of sea foam for which it is named.

As hinted to in the exhibition’s title, a new series of Asteroid works conjunct the same space as the “Meerschaum Drift”. These free-form ceramics embody the terrestrial material of their making while illuminating celestial qualities of asteroids, apparent in their form and unearthly looking glazed surfaces. The works stand for the many known and unknown bodies moving in space which contain the real possibility of violent collision, even as their presence and number in our solar system are always being discovered. Investigating the diffractive relation between human experience, cultural forms, material ecologies, and the natural world, Larner’s Asteroids embody a small piece of the heavens as art and ask us to consider our connection to that which is known but is not always seen.

Liz Larner (b. 1960) received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1985. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Gallery hours by appointment Tues–Sat 10 am – 6 pm

Make a reservation to visit the exhibition here.

www.regenprojects.com

Location:
Regen Projects (Hollywood)
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard
90038 Los Angeles, CA
United States