Liz Young

Young's early work (e.g., Psychic Bleeding, 1986; The Allowance of Pain, 1990–2), featured crudely-wrought assemblage "machines," arranged in theater-like installations and used in performances (which she termed "live procedures") that investigate bodily issues of endurance, struggle, constraint, and the transcendence of pain and limitation.[35][23][2][36] The apparatuses drew on a vocabulary of forms derived from positions of the human body (seated, standing, etc.) and recalled hospital gurneys, operating tables, dunking and electric chairs, confessionals or coffin/cradles.[34][37][23] The contrary processes and materials of their fabrication, however, often precluded practical function,[5][4][21] rendering them, in one description, "ominous and unknowable."[37] Critics such as Roberta Smith of New York Times and Suzanne Muchnic of the Los Angeles Times identified them as homespun and antiquated-looking implements of torture, humiliation or extreme toil[14] that comprised a "horrific prison" of heavy metal contraptions conjuring institutional and political confinement.[13][33] 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.[5][34][11]

Liz Young, Cross Bed, latex, fabric, wood, 30" x 60" x 60", 1997.

Like earlier works, The Dignity of Survival (1992–3) served as both an explorable environment and site for Young's physically demanding "live procedures."[5][21][4] The work's charged objects, displayed in suspended cage-like structures that viewers could enter, included a medical-like device; a vest-like, pregnant-man "coat of shame" with an umbilical cord leading to a rock; a shaving/shearing stand; and The Birth/Death Chair, a fabricated birthing chair connected to a ball-and-chain-like trail of cast-iron bones and human viscera.[38][5][4][14]

Young's subsequent installations extended outward to larger family and social bodies. Mendacity (1996) featured miniature scaled institutional structures (city hall, church, bank, school, hospital, home) clustered like a city block and surrounded by hanging thrift store clothing.[12] 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.[12] 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.[39] Writers interpreted the installation and mysterious, ritual-like performance—which included cutting Young out of a cocoon-like dress—as a satirical subversion of everyday rituals expressing the horror of confinement and repetition.[39][40][41]

Young's body-related art also included paintings and fabricated objects, such as clothing made to look like flesh, mannequin-like figures and prosthetics.[6][25][9] 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.[32][31][42]

During a 1998 residency at the Ucross Foundation[43]—a working ranch—Young began incorporating images of nature, displacing some of her characteristic themes, such as the fragility and pathos of human experience onto animals and plants.[3][17] 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."[30][6][19] Going forward, her work would also draw on the themes, landscape and literature of the American West, images of Americana, and processes such as taxidermy, embroidery and other handicrafts.[3][44][45]

Liz Young, Still Life, installation view with graphite drawings on wood paneling and taxidermy, 120” x 96” x 96”, 2013.

Young's embroidered drawings of the late 2000s were described as balancing finely wrought craft technique and rigorous conceptual underpinnings.[27][45][46] Working with and into freighted, found objects of Americana (flags, deer targets, stuffed animals), she offered both humor—a coat sewn from stuffed animal pelts, including ear flaps and plastic eyes or locusts and rats stitched onto old farming magazine covers—and social critique, as in Balmy Birds (2006),[47] an upside-down American flag whose embroidered black birds conveyed a sense of political anxiety and chaos.[48][27][44] Her 2013 show, "Still Life," incorporated taxidermy animals (a bird and deer) and graphite drawings on wood paneling of the same animals; together they functioned as contemporary memento mori or nature morte depicting images of nature as lifeless, still, and dislocated.[3][49]

Young's later installations, Freed of The Tie Between Root and Soil (Fellows of Contemporary Art, 2017)[50] and "Of Blood and Dirt" (PØST, 2017),[51] explore the cycle of life and mortality through motifs of landscape and nature, the body, blood, and earth.[3][17] 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.[3][17][52]