Liz Larner

Like many of her conceptually oriented peers, Liz Larner is concerned with deconstructing the role of the art institution in its presentation of the artwork. In lesser hands, this has often led to the creation of falsely contrived dualities: specifically, an opposition between artist and establishment in which the inevitable cultural and political seepage between the two sides is either artificially negated or simply denied altogether. Consequently, the circumscribing role of the gallery or museum is simply traded in for another reifying dogma, that of confrontational theory itself. Larner’s work manages to avoid such historicizing closure through a slippery process of ambiguous metonymic association. In a recent group of freestanding and wall sculptures, the artist appears to be exploiting esthetic and scientific process as a metaphor for the uneasy artist-gallery relationship. However,

— Colin Gardner