LIZ-NVal
at Tribes
Crackpots or visionaries, art partners Liz-N-Val have spent more than two decades as fixtures on the international art scene. The duo, one of whose “public art projects” involved taking a “pet canvas named Woof” on walks in Berlin, New York and Paris, remained true to (oddball) character In “Space Travelers” their latest exhibition. The show contained a lot of individual pieces that loosely cohered as an Installation—rather like a low-tech planetarium. It looked as though Liz-N-Val did not sleep until they had made use of every bit of the space—floorboards, ceiling, heating pipes and an upright piano that along with a cluttered bookshelf, simply came along with the gallery
Cotton balls stood out as a primary medium. Shaped into masses and cloud-like forms dangling from the ceiling, the delicate, mundane white fluff, moving almost imperceptibly as slight, random breezes wafted through the gallery, cast shadows on the walls. Liz-N-Val also incorporated plastic children’s toys, the best being a pair of little airplanes that appeared to have crashed into one corner, their noses stuck into holes punched in the walls. Caution! (2003) consisted of a plastic toy hand reaching upward through a cotton-ball cloud affixed lo a vertical pipe; fake blood and guts dripped from its severed wrist. A mixed-medium sculpture, Junior Pissing (2004), involved a cluster of unidentifiable white gloop-another cloud, of sorts-protruding from the wall. Atop this perched a small, pink, naked plastic boy peeing. In Sublime Cuisine (2004), a rocket trailing cotton balls in its wake seemed to have flown through a frying pan that hung from the ceiling.
As proprietors ol the MuseuM of Abstractrealism (occasionally known as the MuseuM of Truth-N-Beauty, open by appointment only), Liz-N-Val have long been fascinated by the play between the representational and the real. Along these lines, a snippet of yellow plastic reading “WET PAINT” hung discreetly across an obscure corner of the gallery, doing what Liz-N-Val do best: making people wonder. Quite without irony, Liz-N-Val remain committed to the idea that art can and should be at once magical and truthful-as Liz once described it, the go-go dancer’s dream of the meditative state”.
-Sarah Valdez