LIBBY BLACK: BE HERE NOW
MARCH 20 – APRIL 24, 2010
Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, March 20, beginning at 5:00 PM
For more information, contact Steve Zavattero
Phone: 415.627.9111/e-mail: info@marxzav.com
Website: www.marxzav.com
In Be Here Now, Libby Black’s eagerly anticipated new solo exhibition at Marx & Zavattero, the artist’s adopted hometown of Berkeley, California’s fashion, food, environmental, and political culture provide inspiration for a new body of work that utilizes a city’s inherent contradictions as a springboard for fresh ideas and self-evaluation. Black’s latest series of oil paintings, painted paper sculptures, and gouache & graphite drawings grapple with her eternal dilemma of what it means to fit in, and at what cost.
Having moved to Berkeley from her home state of Texas over a year ago, Black became fascinated with her new hometown’s deeply ingrained counterculture aesthetic – fusing leftist slogans with a high priced green lifestyle – that has its own way of coding luxury. Black’s luscious gouache, Goyard Recyclable, sets the tone for the exhibition. Here, Black depicts a 100% recyclable Goyard tote filled to the brim with fresh vegetables (probably organic) with a large government sponsored recycle symbol stitched on its side. The sales text and price of the bag is written below in the artist’s childlike scrawl; at a price of $1,065.00 with an additional $310.00 charge for monogramming, it represents the ultimate bag for the ‘hippie with the Rolex watch’.
A series of painted paper sculptures epitomizing California’s freewheeling nature include a row of designer skateboards, a surfboard, and roller skates bearing luxury labels, also laden with bumper sticker slogans that Black has spotted around town. For example, a paint splattered Dolce & Gabbana skateboard, á la Jackson Pollock, features the slogan “God is coming and is She pissed!” Black’s collision of such slogans and luxury brands is an amusing riff on the recent “green-washing” by companies that are disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly. What is great fun for Black is that the traditional luxury brands are now in on it too, providing a “healthy” alternative to their other, less-PC products.
Also on view will be a series of gouaches portraying covers of Lesbian Paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. These pulp pleasure tomes bear campy titles, such as Label My Love Lesbian and That Kind of Girl, illustrating a swinging 60s version of lesbian camp that was arguably written more for the heterosexual male than the closeted lesbian.
Perhaps the artist’s most intimate work to date is the graphite drawing Me and Bobby McGee, whereby Black impersonates Janis Joplin in one of the musician’s most iconic photographs. Topless, layered with beads and gazing directly at the viewer, Black lays claim to this counterculture icon and finds a way to claim herself as a rebel artist, “Who also lived in Texas and liked women as I do.” As with the green sheen of corporate culture, Black too is masquerading as something she is not – and at the same time lets us in on this transparent but delicious fantasy.
Black’s impressive home gym sculpture installation, Workout Room, will be on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art April 10 – June 19, 2010. Her work will also be featured in New Art for a New Century: Recent Acquisitions 2000-2009 at the Orange County Museum of Art. Black has had solo exhibitions at SPACES, Cleveland, OH; Broad Street Gallery, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Other notable exhibitions include the important group survey Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA at the Oakland Museum of California; Bay Area Now 4, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The 2004 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art; The Superfly Effect, Jersey City Museum, NJ; Art on Paper 2008, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Smoke and Mirrors: Deception in Contemporary Art, Visual Arts Gallery, University of Alabama at Birmingham; and Belle du Jour, the inaugural exhibition at Collette Blanchard Gallery, New York, among many, many others.
Black received her MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco in 2001, and her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, Art in America, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Zink Magazine, the New York Times, the Star Ledger, the Los Angeles Times, Elle Magazine, Origina (Mexico City, Mexico), the New York Sun, Art of the Times, New American Paintings, Art Basel Miami Beach (2005 & 2006), San Francisco Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF Bay Guardian, Artweek, Flaunt, 7x7 Magazine, and several other publications. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Orange County Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and The Chaney Family Collection, as well as an impressive number of renowned private collections around the world.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Through painting, drawing, and sculpture my work uses the iconography of the fashion world and luxury brands to investigate the mechanics of desire, access and privilege, while also exploring themes of imperfection, vulnerability and ambivalence.
My paintings and drawings are based on fashion advertisements and magazine spreads. I am drawn to source imagery that might have an ambiguous meaning -- something beyond the intended message to sell a product or feature a trend. In many of the images, the product is absent -- what is there is just a hint at a story or a mood. While the fantasy may be recognizable, the choice of imagery and the way in which I render that imagery is an attempt to read the image’s narrative against the grain. What makes this subject matter interesting to me is that I feel both drawn in by the fantasy and also critical of it.
In addition to painting and drawing, I also create three-dimensional life-size versions of sometimes real, sometimes imagined luxury goods out of paper, hot glue and paint. These objects might be a Burberry skateboard, Hermes roller skates, or a stack of designer luggage. I have also created entire installations of sculptural works, such as a Louis Vuitton boutique in a storefront gallery and a Kate Spade store within a museum. With the sculptural work, I am interested in how the objects appear from a distance to be real, even if implausible, while upon closer inspection the illusion begins to fall apart.
