Tribes Gallery’s Space Travelers
By Mary Hrbacek
Tribes Gallery’s Space Travelers by Mary Hrbacek
In "Space Travelers," the group of twenty-one Pop sculptures and four acrylic and mixed media paintings at Tribes Gallery, artists LIZ-N-VAL merge the simple forms and the satirical humor of cartoons and comic strips with a poetic sensibility that pays homage to the aesthetic vocabulary of surrealist Rene Magritte. Their airy, elevated sculptural works transcend the ordinary, both literally and figuratively. With acerbic wit and a light-hearted approach, the artists convey their message on the fleeting nature of existence through the use of consumer products that range from an aluminum frying pan to wiffle-balls, toys, beads, globes and cotton. In an imaginative, hybrid mix of fine art and functional materials, LIZ-N-VAL explore an array of themes that range from politics, science and metaphysics, to issues of both the pleasurable and the macabre in daily life.
In Sublime Cuisine, a piece constructed with a hanging frying pan and suspended wiffle balls, an airplane appears to pierce the pan’s surface, leaving a jet stream of cotton, in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Twin Towers debacle. The clusters of wiffle-balls in the signature piece Time-Space Travelers resemble atomic forms in an alternate universe, with cartoon-like tiny planes whizzing among them. In an almost identical work, two U.S. Air Force fighter planes seem to have crashed nose first into the gallery walls above the wiffle-ball cosmos. UFO ’04 presents a suspended globe, from which five large wooden sticks surrounded by puffy, cotton clouds protrude at odd asymmetrical angles. The piece resembles a Russian Sputnik satellite from the 1950’s.
In a comparatively earthbound, cautionary note, the artist team explores a more worldly peril in Consuming Pleasure, where a tiny rubber baby sits on top of a corked wine bottle in a cloud of billowing cotton smoke-rings. The artists give another wink at the human reproductive process and its possible outcomes in Caution, a piece in which a disembodied Halloween-style amputated hand is positioned amongst wispy clouds, where a tiny baby crawls like the hand of a cop stopping traffic.
In Blue Puddle, wooden artists’ stretcher bars lie on the ground, creating the boundaries for a puddle of pale blue paint covered with plastic. The piece suggests the blue mood sometimes encountered by artists trying to paint. Burst I and Burst II ,.are inspired by the incidence of foam that spurts from a shaken beer bottle. Both pieces form classical arches, one made of aluminum foil, the other from polyurethane foam, terminating in a deep blue shape that suggests a pool of spilled liquid. A large puffy cotton cloud, suspended from the ceiling, tops the two architectural works, Cloud Pavilion and Sublime Shower,/I>. Strings of pearl beads that suggest raindrops hang down, touching bases on the floor. Both pieces defy gravity in a poetic isolated cloudburst of glittering strings. Sand Puddle appears to be a comment on the havoc that global warming may have on the earth.
The soft, puffy cotton appears to be a metaphor for the human spirit, while the lightweight materials used to form the cosmos and the aluminum globe reflect the fragility of the earth and its atmosphere. This show stresses the ephemeral, transitory quality of natural phenomena and of life’s events. LIZ-N-VAL create poetic, often humorous, anecdotal forms that reflect an energetic, philosophical sense of humor that defies mortality.
