Liz Atlas
Medallions, Transformations
Atlas’s titles often signal humor. Spring Walker is a single large twig with two upside-down-Y forks that suggests a figure, its two legs walking forward, the unadorned upper branch perhaps a swinging arm. One of the “legs” leads into a metal disk while the other, a metal spring around part of it, leads to a wooden wheel of a “foot,” angled forward in about the same direction as the “arm.” So while one leg ends in a round metal “shoe,” the other ends in a wheel. The simple organic perfection of the twig offers a strong contrast to the perfectly repetitive coils of the spring, while the wheel parodies the whole ethos of sculptural projection into space. Abstract forms that taper off into emptiness, the way the uppermost branch ends in this work, often seem designed to seize the territory around them, magnifying the artwork’s transcendent power; by placing the end of another of her twigs in a mass-manufactured wheel, Atlas turns this idea into a joke: this sculpture will not stride forward but advance on rollers.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Many of Atlas’s works suggest birds to her; some also seem to explicitly recall the great master of heroic abstraction Constantin Brancusi, whose influence she acknowledges. The ascending form of Bridal Perch–a series of circular elements leading to a metal rod pointing up–perhaps owes a debt to Brancusi’s Bird in Space. But the shape also suggests a wedding cake: the work is organized as a series of concentric disks growing smaller as they go up; a kitchen stool near the bottom is painted white with circular green stripes. Even more suggestive, the rod on top ends not in a point, projecting off into eternity, but in a multibladed dough blender. Transcendence is not only denied–the ascent is redirected into an object representing women’s work, work that might actually produce a wedding cake.
Intentional gender confusion is a significant source of the humor in Atlas’s sculptures. The lamp shade rises to heavier, more “male” metal only to end in the wonderfully dopey spiral. Aris Douches is full of such “gender fucks.” Atlas found a gray metal vacuum-cleaner part that reminded her of the winged patch airline pilots wear and placed it at the center. Hanging under it on the left is a dirty paintbrush, on the right an elegant gold-colored shower head. Here Atlas seems to juxtapose the “heroic,” phallic paintbrush historically associated with male artists with a “feminine” household object–except that it’s the shower head, hanging long and coming to a bulbous end, that looks phallic, while the paintbrush with its forest of hairs looks more like a vulva.
While Diller doesn’t balance the macho and self-parodic elements of his work as subtly as Atlas does her elegance and humor, his large-scale jokes suggest a simultaneous attraction to and critique of the monumental tradition in American art from Pollock to Rauschenberg. This is perhaps clearest in Totemic Shelf Life. A giant circular shape at the top is surrounded by pointed “petals”; a bright yellow phallic cone protrudes from its center. Mounted on the wall below are progressively smaller black shelves. The higher and wider ones contain a variety of found objects and a sheaf of small Diller paintings (which he encourages viewers to leaf through) while the lower shelves support single objects: a padlock, for example, and a bulbous piece of rough wood Diller shaped himself and painted light blue.
