The delicate beauty and underlying strength of the paintings, drawings, and installation pieces created by Erika Lizee take viewers into a detailed world of flora and fauna, of magical phenomena, of the journey between the stamen of a flower and the multitude of stars in the universe.
Lizee’s coupling of the minute and beautiful with the infinite and grand just won the artist 2nd place at a LA Municipal Art Gallery exhibition. Lizee explains that she’s “awed by the vast intricacies of world we live in.” Her awe is evident in the magical quality of her work that shifts from the detailed reality of a perfectly rendered flower to cellular vastness that may be the unfolding of life itself or of a single living organism. In the artist’s words “I seek to express the sense of wonder I experience contemplating the fluid nature of reality. I am interested in representing the relationship between the known and unknown, the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible.”
The artist creates installations that work as journeys, drawing the viewer down mysterious paths on a pursuit of nature and rebirth. Her sculpted acrylics work to mesh shadow and light, recreating the magical feel of the Northern Wisconsin woods in which Lizee spent much of her childhood. “I have a particularly vivid memory of studying the unfurling coils of a fiddlehead fern, and finding the mystery and beauty of this event,” she relates.
It’s the coupling of mystery and beauty, of a vast wonder and precise detail, that the Chicago-born Lizee shapes for the viewer. With a BFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and her MFA in Painting from California State University Northridge, Lizee is an Associate Professor of Art at Moorpark College and Director of the Moorpark College Art Gallery when she is not crafting her enigmatic, lush, and galvanizing works.
Lizee’s drawings are perfectly nuanced graphite on paper, each more riveting and precise than the last. In “Moving Closer to Solidity,” two flowers, one light, one dark overlap. Sheer petals over solid, these flowers remind the viewer of lillies, orchids, the fecundity of spring. In “Clearly Visible,” three sprays of orchids are each wrapped inside cellophane. Are they isolated from each other and from us, or we from them? What do we see, in plain sight, but refuse to unwrap? What mysterious gifts await us that we package and contain, set aside and limit?
Lizee explains “Abstracted plant life emits ethereal and luminous forms that transcend our notions of natural phenomena. The viewer is often transported into a realm where pure essence radiates from bulbous pods and reaching petals, whispering a private invitation to the moment.”
Her paintings continue such an invitation. In “Emanations,” a violet flower with grey and white circling ever outward from it, lights up this acrylic-on-canvas work. With “Connecting Breath,” white, purple, teal, and grey notes slip out with amorphous filaments born from a flower. Acrylic on linen, “Searching the Landscape of the Unknown” radiates an almost neon-quality brightness to white, blue, lavender, and brown filaments floating like smoke. It reads almost as if it were a detail taken and redefined from the artist’s larger, darker installation piece “…and yet, things continue to unfold.” This piece was a part of Lizee’s installation at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, created with acrylic on Duralar in shades of silvery blue , white, and light violet. The viewer wonders at what is unfolding here – the universe, a flower? Or perhaps both, all at once.
Like the lush flowers and filaments in Lizee’s work, the artist’s career is likewise unfolding, with exhibits scheduled for 2016 at the LAX, and at the 643 Project Space in Ventura. Lizee has recently exhibited at GALA Exhibits in Glendale, Calif., the JK Gallery in Los Angeles, and the FireHouse Gallery in Grants Pass, Ore., among may other locations. Lizee is currently exhibiting at Angels’ Ink Gallery in San Pedro, Calif. through September 25th, and at the BG Gallery in Santa Monica, opening on August 8th. She is also exhibiting at the LA Municipal Art Gallery Juried Exhibition through September 20th.
- Genie Davis