Between You and Me

For her art, Craft draws primar­ily on ideas from the Amer­ic­an coun­ter­cul­ture of the 1960s, psy­che­del­ic ex­per­i­ences and pop cul­ture.. She bor­rows im­agery from B-movies, West­erns and hor­ror films as well as from com­ics and the aes­thet­ics of amuse­ment park back­drops. Craft fre­quently lifts fig­ures such as witches, uni­corns, mo­tor­cyc­lists, pir­ates and the Grim Reap­er out of their fa­mil­i­ar con­texts to quote, ex­ag­ger­ate or con­dense them in her works. The in­stall­a­tion Ms. Amer­ica (2022) is based on Pac-Man, a well-known char­ac­ter from the very first video games. Craft has put a red bow on the fig­ure’s head and re­duced its body to a black vel­vet toga. In con­trast to the ex­press­ive ges­tures of her Spider Ladies (2015), the fig­ures in Ms. Amer­ica are ali­en­ated through their stat­ic poses, mouths wide open and gazes look­ing blankly up at the ceil­ing.

Dis­played in the ex­hib­i­tion space, the works enter into re­la­tion­ships with each other, like act­ors in a theatre piece. The fig­ures’ gazes, words and ges­tures are ar­ranged in new con­stel­la­tions each time they are presen­ted, al­ways telling a dif­fer­ent story. In the series Speech Bubbles, wall sculp­tures whose shape re­calls the speech bubbles in comic books or in­stant mes­sages seem to be hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions amongst them­selves. The works bear punchy titles such as Suck it Hip­pie! (2017) or Do You Love Me Now (2019). The dia­logue going on between two large sculp­tures is in­dic­ated by their re­spect­ive titles: The first asks What are you going to do about it? and re­ceives a lac­on­ic Go fuck your­self as re­sponse (both 2017).

Craft’s sculp­tur­al work has a sprawl­ing qual­ity, for ex­ample the wall piece Strange Thing (2018), a para­sit­ic or­gan­ism made of elec­tric­al switch boxes and cable lines that spreads out across the walls, ex­plor­ing its bound­ar­ies. The sculp­tures call to mind that par­tic­u­lar brand of Cali­for­ni­an ir­rev­er­ence that can be summed up by the words “Too Cool for School”. This phrase re­flects an at­ti­tude de­rived from Amer­ic­an teen movies, de­scrib­ing a cas­u­al but ar­rog­ant in­di­vidu­al who likes to defy rules and so­cial codes. But it is also the title of a well-known art­icle by au­thor Den­nis Cooper about the bois­ter­ous and vi­brant art scene in 1990s Los Angeles, in the con­text of which he men­tions Craft’s name. This scene drew its life primar­ily from the ded­ic­a­tion of UC­LA’s School of Arts and Ar­chi­tec­ture, from which Liz Craft had just gradu­ated at the time the art­icle was writ­ten. Her archive ...my life in the sun­shine (2006–2017) test­i­fies to the rel­ev­ance of this com­munity of artists. “Too Cool for School” is an ex­pres­sion that would also have made an apt title for a work by Liz Craft. Be­cause the artist likes to work with for­mu­la­tions that are trenchant and barbed but still “fun”.

In co­oper­a­tion with the Kun­sthaus Centre d’art Pasquart, Biel/Bi­enne