Cool Hunting

If one desires to engulf oneself in a delightfully transgressive feeling, MacArthur genius grant-winner Liza Lou’s first London solo exhibition at White Cube is open until 8 April 2006. Otherwise, wait for announcements from Deitch gallery, representing Lou in New York. Forms in the show are also good inspirational resources for visual communications folks who need representations of purgatory on earth.

Cell and White Cube are two new works of black hole beauty. White Cube is a vacant closet size space with a bucket and a noose. Cell, constructed over the course of two years using wood, fiberglass and glass beads, is more elaborate and even more distressing. By refusing to name the exact imprisonment it represents, the void becomes a universalism. Around the room are new additions to Lou’s town off contorted human figures, also painstakingly covered with beads. These beads, consciously or unconsciously, speak about the lingering pre-Reformation Catholicisms in punitive Christianity as well as the tautology between and allegedly redemptive Calvinist work ethic and unforgiving self-punishment.

Born Again, a 50 minute film interview with Lou about her Pentecostal upbringing is being screened at near-by Hoxton Square Cinema. Hopefully, a similar stateside show will come around. If Lou’s work were a classic rock album, she’d be Metallica’s self-titled album mashed up with Joy Division’s Closer with a little In the Nursery thrown in.

by Kristopher Irizarry