Trailer

Peer into a mysterious scene within Trailer by artist Liza Lou. In her paintings, sculptures, and installations rigorously assembled from glass beads, Lou interrogates notions of power, myth, and gender in the United States. Marshaling time itself as a material, the artist both illuminates acts of invisible labor and encourages discovery: in Trailer, an eerie narrative emerges.

On public view for the first time in a decade, Trailer is a major addition to the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. The work fills the interior of a 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer stationed in the Museum’s entry pavilion. Inside, the colors are limited to replicate the allure and intensity of Hollywood film noir. Everything is rendered in glass beads, from the furniture, typewriter, and glossy men’s magazines to the guitar, guns, and shots of whiskey. Trailer thus demands close looking—at both its intricacy and its allusions, questioning what is revealed and what is hidden. Like pixels, the beads dazzle and coalesce into shapes and patterns, forming a sinister spectacle that examines masculinity, despair, isolation, and obsession.

Liza Lou (b. 1969 NYC lives and works in Joshua Tree, California) is widely known for her pioneering work as both an artist and for her groundbreaking social practice of the mid-2000s. Beginning with her conceptual use of glass beads, Lou’s room-size installations of the 1990s challenged stereotypes and gender roles within the art canon and broke down boundaries between art and craft.¹ In 2002, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which she utilized to found a women’s advocacy program within her studio in Durban, South Africa which she operated from 2005-20, expanding the possibilities of social engagement within an art studio environment. During the 15 years she lived and worked in South Africa, Lou developed a poetic, handmade approach to Minimalism that utilizes the oils of the human hand as a form of paint in woven paintings, such as Soil | Solid (2012), which is in the permanent collection of the Des Moines Art Center, and room-scaled wall works, sculptures and installations, such as Security Fence (2005), now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Continuous Mile (2008), in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Current work has the artist in further dialogue with art history as she explores the possibility of her chosen material to act as a fluid paint body, bringing an original and Feminist vision to painting.² Through the slow accrual of a humble material, Lou recalibrates the action of a brushstroke into elaborate, cell-by-cell explorations that combines the exuberance of Pop and Abstract Expressionism with the materiality and sheen of her early work, while pushing the language of painting further forward.