Regen Projects in Los Angeles – March 27 – May 22, 2021
“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
Excerpted from the Regen Projects press release: 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.
Liz Larner’s As Stars and Seas Entwine exhibition at Regen Projects in Los Angeles presented itself as an opportunity to revisit her much earlier exhibition at Regen Projects, one that I wrote about almost 24 years ago. There was a need, I felt, to “correct” my earlier impressions of her work. Admittedly, my reading had been a limited take – the siphoned sliver of an aspect of the work of a seriously-minded artist. It seemed incongruous for an artist undergirded by a weighty philosophical base to produce something so light and fun.
