Liza Lou
“Woven”
New York, 501 West 24th Street
Forging an original, Feminist-inflected vision from the very beginning of her career, Lou has consistently challenged and expanded the boundary between the fine and applied arts. She has created figurative, room-sized installations, brightly chromatic sculptures, and mesmerizing minimal canvases, all of which render labor radically visible on both formal and conceptual registers. Over the past fifteen years, the artist has turned her focus to abstraction and repetitive processes to engage with art history while exploring the conceptual and metaphoric potential of certain abiding dualities, from presence and absence to cohesion and disintegration. Each of the works in Woven highlight Lou’s engagement with repetition and focus, as well as her deep understanding of materiality. In particular, her paintings and drawings use pen and graphite to “weave” cloth-like structures on a flat canvas—investigating the possibility of the two-dimensional format for making visible the thought process within repetitive labor.
Anchoring the exhibition is through failure is, a new 100 by 102 inch rendering of a bead-woven cloth, constructed from row upon row of ovals. Working alone in a deeply contemplative process, Lou drew each oval or “bead” by hand on a ground of monochromatic oil paint. Each mark was subsequently gone over again, with Lou circling the “good ones” in red pencil. Finally, the interstices were filled in, becoming gestural in aggregate and creating a portrait of labor. In through failure is, Lou’s serene and meditative surface gives way to nervous ripples and disturbances, flowing through the entire work in intricate networks or tributaries that mirror the neural networks of thought process itself. From a distance, the painting appears atmospheric, with the minute variations in color creating a remarkable sense of depth and perspective. At close range, however, any outside associations give way to the immersive and seemingly endless bead-like ovals. While the repetition and iterative use of primary form recalls foundational tenets of Minimalism, Lou’s matrix shifts organically, exceeding the confines of the grid.
Considered a primer to this exhibition, Syllabus is a tile-like cloth woven with white glass beads that were subsequently hammered off. In contrast to through failure is, which underscores the oval gesture by repetitively tracing the same mark, the beads in Syllabus are shattered away to reveal the deep burgundy threads underneath. Here, Lou uses a subtractive, rather than additive method to draw attention to the work beneath the work.
