LENA LIV
Crucial to Liv’s success is her superb use of materials. The austere simplicity of her work, the way she constructs each piece out of only a few beautifully presented elements, deepens the mysterious aura that each element seems to evoke. (Interestingly, the one earlier work of hers I’ve seen, which is more cluttered with imagery, is less successful.) Particularly impressive is Liv’s use of handmade paper. In her hands it is shaped, made into three-dimensional reliefs, torn, reassembled; it has at once the organic qualities of a living thing and the machine-made qualities of a designed object. In virtually all the works, the paper’s texture, which is rough enough to suggest the wood fiber from which it was made, evokes a contemplation of the relationship between the forms of nature and those of the human imagination, a relationship suggested by other elements in the work as well.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For example, one of the untitled works in this show consists of a large disk of handmade paper with a tear along its vertical diameter. At the center, as if emerging from the tear, is an old photograph of two small children. The disk is mostly black, but a few small blue dots fleck its surface. There is also a single blue dot on the photograph. The dots seem to suggest stars in the night; but then what of the single dot on the photograph? And why are these “stars” not white but the color of the twilight sky? Through this sort of rejection of literal representation, these surprising displacements of color and location, Liv produces a vision of the interpenetration of the natural and the human, the metonymic and the metaphoric.
There’s more. Below the horse, but leaning against it and resting on the floor, is a tree branch, and on one part of the paper horse near the branch’s end are leaflike shadows. References to nature and childhood in both their literal and imaginative aspects are thus perfectly balanced in this work, and it is such balance that gives Liv’s work much of its expansive quality. We are encouraged to relate childhood play to the whole range of human imagination, to birth and death and the order of nature, and we are encouraged to think about such things without being told what to think.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
