Liz Young
[2][3][4] She has produced sculpture, installation, performance, painting, drawing and video incorporating fabricated and recontextualized found objects, organic materials, and processes from industrial metalworking to handicrafts, taxidermy and traditional art practices.
In 1981, she relocated to Los Angeles to attend Otis College of Art and Design (BFA, 1984), where she was influenced by performance and body artists, such as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
[6][29][4] Her work combined fabricated elements (ranging from welded cages and hand-crafted nails to clothing and taxidermy animals), organic materials, and familiar objects evoking memory, which she refashioned and recontextualized.
[6][7][4] She explored themes involving the body and its limits, the human condition, loss, and the inevitability of nature;[6][30] writers described her art, variously, as challenging and visceral,[5][31] unsettling,[7][14] black-humored,[32][33] and autobiographical, emotional and haunting.
[14][34] Vacillating between public and private spheres, the installations physically positioned viewers as complicit voyeurs, potential victims, or perpetrators within spaces and situations implying danger, imprisonment, or ritual.
[13] Frieze critic Michelle Grabner wrote that its tactile, construction-grade materials and household objects created an "uncanny physical life" capturing the tension between the seductions of institutions and their function of control.
[13] For Skin Inn (1997), Young constructed an oddly furnished (the cruciform Cross Bed, a grafted junk chair-and-love seat, and seesawing dining chairs) mobile home, which housed a silent, opening-night performance by a "family" of three as viewers peered in through doors and windows.
[7][26][10] In 1997, she exhibited thirteen, small, commonplace portraits of her deceased relatives, painted with her own blood; critics described them as haunting, morbid, and intimate, noting the delicate handling of the pigment, which featured transparent glazes and areas of thick application that cracked like Old Master surfaces.
[4][18] In a 2001 Skirball Cultural Center show of COLA Fellowship winners, her installation combined life-size models of farm animals covered with flesh-like material rather than fur, and a business suit and nurse's uniform fabricated from skin-like industrial bags; Los Angeles Times critic Holly Myers described them as "simultaneously vague and uncomfortably visceral.
[4][18] Both shows employ two- and three-dimensional, positive and negative images in sculpture and drawings that often focus on the absence of the body or nature; these images include a cut-out window silhouette of a dead or dormant tree out of which graphic, red, sculptural roots/arteries emanate (Blood in the Roots, 2017), and isolated, silhouette-like drawings of bare trees, text, dead birds and deer emerging out of dark fields of gunpowder, graphite, and ballpoint pen.
