Statement:
Reflecting on human longing, an exhibition of ceramic sculpture, furniture, and tile wall pieces draws on myths and spiritualities of the past, pairing them up with familiar motifs of the digital age & late capitalism. What are the hopes and dreams closest to us and how do we make sense of them in this era of consumption?
How can we tap into our own super stories to reckon with the power structures that try to capitalize on and monetize our dearest longings?
This exhibition uses motifs of myth, heroes & legends, video games, commercial packaging, advertisements, and media to raise questions about the ways in which we are searching and finding our dreams along with an alarming excess of material, energy, and information we are being marketed.
Game play and storytelling is a space that holds personal memories for many of us and a space in which we get invested, even as an escapist diversion, and yet there is something revealed in this suspension of one world for another, reminding us how we’d like to perhaps see ourselves, as the protagonist in a great and epic story.
The commercial dynamics of the video gaming industry lend the sculpture and wall pieces a sense of context, the exchange of cultural motifs, internalized colonialism and the marketing of one’s own culture as a product.
In this time of an American presidential transition, power, hierarchy, and questions of longing, greed, and the ethics (or lack thereof) of colonial capitalism are floating in the atmosphere.
Artist Bio
Liisa Nelson was born and raised in Montana. The wildness of nature and the quietude of mountains is in her blood.
In 2018 she graduated with an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She holds a BFA from Pacific Lutheran University and a post-baccalaureate from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
She has been an Artist in Residence at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute (JCI) (Jingdezhen, China) in Fall 2019, and Visiting Artist at The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) (Beijing, China) in Spring 2019. She has taught at Alfred University and worked closely with students at JCI, and CAFA as a mentor and advisor. In 2020, Nelson founded Theorii Contemporary Art Space, an experimental gallery that is currently transitioning from brick-and-mortar to a digital and pop-up based project.
Her work is in several private and museum collections nationally and internationally.
