I wrote about my friend Liz Sweibel’s work and recent exhibit, see - Many Kinds of Nothing Creates a Nice Art Space. The site organizes her work into three galleries that show pieces that work together. I especially liked the interiors series in gallery two. They are mixed media collages. I liked the simplicity and stark presentation. These interiors reminded me of some of the interior images of the contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio López García, who I greatly admire. It is not a literal comparison as the work by Liz is on a very small scale (e.g., 1.5" x 1.25") and this is part of their appeal. Lopez Garcia does super realism on a large scale. It is rather the feeling that each evoke, one that is hard to put into words in each case.
Liz also provides a play section that offers her more experimental work, as well as a statement and more background. The statement concludes, “My work uses modest materials, simple gestures, and its slight presence to cultivate space and slow time. I hope for it to be a quiet yet persistent call for attention, an invitation to stop and experience the nuances of the moment, and to realize that there is much to cherish and much we can do better.” I think she achieves this goal with her work.
On the site you can click on an image to get a bigger view and then click again to get an even bigger view. She links to her Flickr photo stream for some nice images. You can also join her email list.
Liz has started a blog that seems mostly devoted to her art. I especially liked the post, "But the Visual Is Not Reducible to the Verbal." This is an issue I have had a life long interest in as both an artist and a cognitive psychologist. Liz starts with her efforts to categorize her work, a task that requires using words to describe the visual, a cross-media task. She concludes the post, “As someone who's made a living from words for 30 years, this dilemma is actually exhilarating. It's always been my need to make work that exceeds (if not precedes) words, to get at something beyond (if not before) our brains' capacity to reduce it to the verbal.”
"To go on from here I can't use words, they don't say enough." is a line from one of my favorite Jefferson Airplane songs, Today. I agree with this much more than the Bee Gees lyrics, "words are all i have to..." I think that words work best at the intersection of symbols, the words, and thought. The symbols have no intrinsic meaning, only the thoughts we share. It is words that push your thought to new places that are most effective. This is even more true for visual images. I think that Liz's work achieves this goal.
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