Lia Halloran
Installation view, UNTITLED San Francisco 2018
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce From Observation, A Search Party, a group presentation at UNTITLED SF 2018 featuring paintings by Elizabeth Huey, large-scale cyanotypes by Lia Halloran, and new videos and photographs by Julie Weitz, to be presented from January 12-14, 2018. From Observation, A Search Party features three artists whose work explores the formation of identity and subjectivity through the study of forgotten feminist, scientific, technological, and healing histories.
Elizabeth Huey's paintings explore human connection, advancement, and healing contextualized by proto-feminist visionaries and communities. Her historical research delves into the complexities of group labor, experimentation, recreation, and rehabilitation. Myriad forces—nature, architecture, culture, history—are at work on Huey’s protagonists. Surprising spatial arrangements and scale shifts support a hypnagogic sense of seeing from the inside out, as she creates dynamics that allow the viewer to reconsider these histories through new a framework.
Lia Halloran’s Your Body is a Space That Sees references the discoveries of a group of women in the late 1800s that became known as the ‘Harvard Computers’. Making significant impacts in the field of astronomy, the team used photographic glass plates to establish classification systems for stars. Taking this cue, Halloran creates her own plates by painting on semi-transparent film. These “negatives” block sunlight from light-sensitive paper to make cyanotypes. Halloran creates a new female-centric catalog, illuminating the Computers’ research and creating a poetic galaxy of forgotten feminist histories.
Julie Weitz’s videos explore the psychology of embodiment in the digital realm. Weitz combines B-horror, psychedelic, and anti-CGI aesthetics to make works that intentionally blur the boundaries between sensory perception and subjectivity. Weitz is inspired by Audio Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos commonly found on YouTube, describing them as “sensory experience through a digital mechanism”. Weitz mirrors and complicates this pseudo-scientific social phenomenon marked by crinkling plastic, dramatic whispers, and alleged head orgasmic sensation, though her version of ASMR includes critical references to Greek theater and other mythmaking aesthetics.