Regen Projects is presenting 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 debuts 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. Meerschaum Drift, 2021, a large, low floor sculpture constructed of plastic refuse Larner collected over the course of three years, seems to billow and surge through the space like seafoam. 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.
VR Sunil Gohil
