magnetic instinct, Liz Larner’s current exhibition at Regen Projects, balances the textures and colors of her unique ceramic sculptures with the simplicity of her 1989 work Rubber Divider. The show is also part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming.
From the press release-
“…for wander is a verb that needs no object…My aim is to limit myself to the ingenuity of innate action, to be awed by it, and not to try and clear up its mysteries.”
—Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts, 2015, pp. 37/46
The exhibition presents new ceramic works surrounding Larner’s “Rubber Divider, 1989—two sheets of pure gum rubber connected to steel rods attached to two flame-cut, solid steel blocks that hold the tension of the opposing pull of weight and elasticity of the rubber sheets. Their opposition and mutual dependence underscores Larner’s longstanding interest in the relationship between structural support and the attitude of the object.
Engaged with the many possibilities of sculpture and abstract form, Larner uses material to encourage discoveries led by an intrinsic link between impulse and perception. Polished to a mirror finish, the brass and aluminum of these sculptures allows them to be positioned on the wall, as the side of the glazed ceramic facing the wall is reflected in the cool light of aluminum and the warm glow of brass. Each surface has its own quality, from the extremely reflective to a textured matte, and these differences create a varying vibrancy of reflected light. Larner’s ceramics highlight a symbiotic continuity that troubles definitions of art and environment, object and subject.
Larner’s morphological research thinks likewise with ecological networks, as described in the writings of Fernand Deligny, or by the botanist Anne Pringle, in “Establishing New Worlds: The Lichens of Petersham.” The dialogue between these new works and Larner’s more historic sculpture, Rubber Divider—which debuted in the 1989 Whitney Biennial—underscores the interplay between support, form, surface effect, and infrastructure, that has often animated her practice, exploring how our observed experience of the world is innately personal but based on connection. Mindful of the specter of the Anthropocene, it also occasions a meditation on how we distinguish past and present, wondering what forms, what artifacts of human action and intelligence will last, and outlast us.
Distinguished by the unique physical rules that govern its transition, from soft to fragile to almost indestructible, Larner engages clay in part because of its apparent self-determination and pliancy, a kind of material agency and chemical intelligence distinct from our own. The ceramic forms in this exhibition are molded by impressions with ubiquitous forms made with a precision that often goes unnoticed. These forms are softened by the contact of the clay being shaped by them. The consequence of this method of forming is ghostly and transpositional. Among many other potential interpretations and resonances, the exhibition’s title points to these principles, and likens them to the same encodings that inform human perception and the activity of many other life-forms, as we are learning to be of and with.
Larner’s work is also currently on view as part of Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean at the Orange County Museum of Art and For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego . Both shows are also part of PST ART: Art and Science Collide.
For more on her creative process, and earlier work, check out the video below from Art21 in 2016.
