Liz Craft, USA-Los Angeles (*1970)

The Los Angeles-based sculptress Liz Craft creates a world situated between magical fantasy and Californian counter-culture, a world of the unicorn, the man-size spider, a smoking hippy or a witch in a pearl dress. The sculptures have a haphazard air about them, as if they were borrowed from another time. In Ballad of a Hippie (2003), Craft banishes her cross-legged hippie, with his guitar and his conspicuous billow of smoke, into a sculptural state- a testimony to an age that she observes with refreshing wit and detachment. The smoke cloud turns into a creature in its own right, a genie from a bottle, a spirit of hippie culture, which runs throughout California and marks it to this day.

One is never quite certain which portion of ideals, citations or worlds of escape determine Liz Craft's sculptures. Many things are reminiscent of the surreal aspects of the '68 generation that wanted to go beyond existing boundaries by bringing "Imagination to power". There is nostalgia for the times of flower power and utopias, but Liz Craft deals with them in a free and relaxed way, as if they belonged to a Grimm's fairy tale. Venice Witch (2003) possesses hallucinatory aspects, an old bag on the form of a skeleton wearing a pearl dress roller-skates on lightning bolt with a mirrored surface to music from a ghetto blaster. Her long claws measure the beat, her mouth is ready for a kiss, and behind her are images of vivid scenes from Venice Beach and Santa Monica. It's a place where dreams of an alternative life can flourish: hippies, eccentrics, rappers, bodybuilders, Jamaican drummers and tourists who search cheap stores for authentic bargains.

The fascination with Liz Craft's works rises from the hallucinogenic joy in the strange selection of materials and their absurd use - as if through the utilisation of bronze, a substance for eternity and almost indestructible, they defined the infiniteness of what is utopian. Besides is permanent bronze is at least as retrogard and nostalgic as the subject of fantasy itself. In the blending of the two, however, the gravity of the subject matters seems to disappear. The contrast between the material and the theme could hardly be greater, for the Flower Power generation lived for the moment in the here and now, in an ephemeral condition that threatened to vanish any second.

In comparison, the wish to experiment with new forms of life has become very minimal in the past decades and been quickly replaced by a sense of bored detachment and an enlightened state of not knowing what to do. Liz Craft confronts us with fantastic energies and myths, thus initiating a discourse that is ambiguous and fictitious, situated somewhere between truth and lies, creating spaces without a direct political content and open for our projections. An open end, no solution, no clear party names mentioned.

Liz Craft: Hairy Guy (with flower basket), 2005
culpture, Bronze, oil paint
30 in l x 44 in w x 41.5 in h (76.2 x 11.76 x 105.41 cm)

Curriculum vitae

lives and works in Los Angeles

Liz Craft: Ballad of the Hippie, 2003
Bronze and peacock feather
78 x 32 x 29 inches

Liz Craft: Snow-capped Mountain Mamas 2003
Ceramic, glaze smaller piece: 14 x 19 x 13 inches
larger piece: 20 x 26 x 15 inches

exhibitions, festivals (selection)

solo exhibitions

"Liz Craft", Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

group exhibitions

"Gilbert Bretterbauer & Liz Craft", Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

catalogues & museum publications

Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

publications (selection)

Pagel, David. Review, Art/Text, 59. 1997