LIZ COLLINS

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Liz Collins: Cosmologies, an exhibition of mixed-media textile works on view from November 4 through December 22, 2023. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 4, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. 

Cosmologies runs concurrent with Collins’ participation in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke, on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and traveling to The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The National Gallery of Art Canada, Ottawa; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This groundbreaking exhibition features a group of seminal artists noted for their pioneering contributions to textiles as an artistic medium.

Liz Collins has long challenged the boundaries of art, fashion, and design with a decades-long commitment to experimenting, innovating, and deconstructing the shape-shifting potentials of textiles. Deeply informed by counter-cultural, punk, and pop movements in fashion and its everyday role in facilitating self-expression, her practice is rooted in a queering of expectations and normative functions.

In Cosmologies, Collins materializes her ruminations on origin stories of the universe, mythologies of ethereal forces and energies imbued in objects, signs, and attitudes — the visible and invisible animation of life forces; the vibrations of motion and emotion informing intuition and unspoken communication. A visual lexicon of energy sources informed by archetypes and the esoteric semiotics of Tarot cards are revealed in a wheel of lightning bolts, broken skies, and cracked mirrors.

The works in this exhibition present an array of materials, from glittery sequins to reflective synthetics to brightly colored fibers, produced mechanically and by hand. The persistence of materials undergoing assembly, stitching, embellishments, strain, and fray unfold narratives of life cycles and transformation.

Collins highlights the motion integral to creating the works by oscillating colors in the woven designs — with some reversible, divulging the agility of patterns — the reverse image shows an index of colorful motion, crisscrossed layers, and mechanical tenacity. Through a fetishization of fabrics, Collins reveals the exciting and critical material influence that impacts our personal lives and spaces.