NEW YORK, NY.- PS122 Gallery is presenting Magnetic featuring the works of
Victor Liu, sculpture, and Laura Smith, drawings. Invisible energy is alluring and active, full of doubts and anxieties, as it directs not only interactions in the world but also personal and artistic worlds. Magnetic explores these mysterious influences of attraction and unease as dynamism in Liu’s and Smith’s respective art processes. The artists’ works, minimal nuances with a neutral palette, are neither rational nor predictable, however, they exist in a primal state. That state arises in fluid vividness channeled throughout the gallery space holding the viewer in a magnetic gaze.
Combining traditional casting methods with newer technologies, Victor Liu’s elusive figures intertwine latent myths, anime, and historical influences with today’s headlines. The hybrid works mix-and-match the pose of an Egyptian god with multiple arms to a soldier with prosthetic legs and machine gun crutches while an improbable regal-looking black swan holding forth a divining branch and a talisman. Liu harnesses his apprehension into elegant metaphorical forms that are toy-like in size, displayed with an elevated status on their custom pedestals, to induce the viewer into conversations of entanglements pushed and pulled one way or another.
Soft and dense, Laura Smith’s Illuminated Black series of graphite drawings on sleek Dura-Lar, transpires through a unique, multi-stage process manifesting as lines of force. Smith begins by assembling collages made from the negative space of her older sculpture and using the outer edges and any interior negative spaces to define a positive form. She compares her intuitive process to the musicians' understanding that music is not in the notes but in the silence between them; the dark horse at a racetrack is expected to come in last but wins the race to everyone’s surprise. Smith’s mesmerizing objects are records of the results by following the system she discovered to create her work and by the graphite’s reflective qualities.
Victor Liu is a Taiwanese-born American artist who lives and works in NYC. Liu has participated in exhibitions throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, including at the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY, and is a recipient of an NYFA fellowship with commissions from the Whitney Museum's Artport and Turbulence.org. He has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, an MA from Yale University, and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley.
Laura Smith was born in Kansas and currently divides her time between Arizona and NYC. She will have a solo exhibition in 2025, Black Illuminated, at Everybody, Arizona. Smith was included in numerous group exhibitions and benefits at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Fashion Moda, MAX FISH, Robert Miller Gallery, and Smack Melon all in NYC, and the Rijks Akademie/Fodor Museum, Amsterdam. Parsons School of Design, BFA in Painting, and a Prix de Rome semi-finalist.
PS122 Gallery is a dynamic, collaborative not-for-profit space in the East Village for 45 years providing opportunities and support services for emerging and under-recognized artists. The gallery reopened in January 2019 after a six-year renovation process which brought the building up to code, doubled the gallery in size, and allowed the expansion of programming capacity of the arts and community organizations housed in the historic NYC-owned building.
