Installation photo credit: Jeff McLane

On the occasion of Liz Glynn’s inclusion in LACMA’s inaugural exhibition, Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a suite of recent works in our viewing room. Glynn’s sculpture The Futility of Conquest (Cavalcade) is currently featured in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries, along with her sculpture Untitled (After Shade) outside of the Resnick Pavilion.

Liz Glynn’s practice spans large-scale installation, sculptural objects, and participatory performances that examine the rise and fall of empires by tracing the cultural output, lost artifacts and contested legacies of both ancient and recent history. Of particular interest to Glynn are the cycles of creation and destruction inherent to colonization and conquest, where objects are destroyed, looted, and plagiarized before being integrated into the dominant cultural narrative. Her work mines the narrative arcs and ruined monuments of past civilizations to locate opportunities for individual agency and the potential for change.

The sculptures featured in Glynn’s spotlight exhibition play with the concept of pressure, expressed materially through processes that employ extreme heat, physical manipulation, and the artist’s hands. This pressure and its attendant sense of imminent collapse is made manifest in the interplay between malleability and rigor that reappears in many of Glynn’s works, whether sculpted from clay, cast in metal, or draped and hardened around a soft body. Frequently operating within the long legacy of sculptural copying or reinterpretation of iconic archetypes, Glynn scrutinizes the way value is constructed and blurs the distinction between authenticity and replica. The forms she chooses to reproduce and memorialize in stainless steel – a tumbleweed and palm frond – sit somewhere between precious relic and urban detritus. Their tendency to migrate with the wind has been frozen in place and their delicate structure is rendered solid, almost formidable. A glazed ceramic suit of “armor” hangs from a steel armature, its plates contoured around an absent body. A ceramic wall sculpture is puckered by the deep ridges and imprints of the hands that worked the material in its pliable form. The works lay bare the mechanics of their production while reveling in the poetry of their transformation.