Last friday was the opening of Liz Craft first solo exhibition at Jenny’s. The show is titled “The Secret Lives of Spiders” and combines new ceramic works, mixed media sculptures, and wall drawings.
Her life-size Spider Woman are tethered to the gallery walls by webs and have eight eyes which cast questioning glances at each otter, and at us. Tangled in conversation their threads become an extension of thought. The gallery space is charges with nervous energy, chatter, brimming with polite talk and smiles, but beneath we can’t help but think…
The daily web can get tedious. “What cha been up to? Same old thing…” Craft’s table piece Office Talk features ceramic mal genitals making chit chat. Both functional desk and sculpture, the piece is activated by the fallerists who join in the exchange. Craft’s ceramic mouths and hand-drawn speech balloons suspend dialogue in mid-air, leaving words to inhabit the walls and seep into the surroundings. A stream of text bubbles and comments infiltrate our field of vision, interrupted by the snarl of yarn and by onlooking bodies and conversation.
Craft has created a complicated space, where objects rake the activity of the gallery and its inhabitants for gossip and maybe something serious. They want to talk.
4220 Sunset Boulevard
(text from the gallery)
