liz lang art

For the exhibition at the Paradise Center for the Arts, I chose to share the full collection of sketches.  They were presented in a simple white frame to mimic the IG grid and intentionally installed in a linear fashion.  Each piece is 12 x 12” and for sale.

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Paradise Center for the Arts, Jan 8 - Feb 13, 2021

Watch Virtual Artist Talk, recorded Jan 21, 2021

My #lizlanglinearproject is a response to a series of questions I started asking myself during the summer of 2019.  I had become increasingly curious about the role of social media in our collective identity as a form of documentation, as well as its role in my studio practice.  At the time, I was taking the light rail from my home in Saint Paul to my job in Minneapolis.  My daily path would take me over the Mississippi River followed by a twenty-minute walk.  It was within this mundane commute that I started to notice the beauty in the ordinary and decided to capture this simplicity through a daily sketch and posting them to my Instagram account.  As the days continued, it became apparent that this notion of marking time through observation was informing my paintings in my studio.  It created a solid presence and left me wondering if social media could become a medium for an art project.  This simple question became the catalyst for my #lizlanglinearproject.  As I started to develop the parameters for the project, I was also highly aware that there was a new decade looming on the horizon.  Because I was interested in marking time with a daily sketch, I decided to think about them as “placeholders” for our collective count-down to the new year.  This led to a deeper investigation of the rituals that we hold as we cross these invisible thresholds.  I wondered mostly why we choose to carry some things forward and want to let go of other experiences.  And ultimately, this left me questioning if we can truly eliminate pieces from the past? 

To fully investigate these ideas with social media acting as a medium, I decided the project would be most successful through two phases.  The first phase would be physical (making the sketches in 2019), and the second phase would be virtual (posting the sketches in 2020).  It would then encompass 100 days in both directions from the threshold of the new year with the physical becoming subtractive (_ days until the new year) and the virtual becoming additive (_ days from the new year).  I was curious to see what would happen with assigning this dual identity to each day.  Little did I know that our lives would drastically change as the days unfolded.