Smith College Oresman Gallery, 2018

SUSPENDED: Drawings by Liza Phillips

The larger-than-life size gestural drawings depict chairs wrapped in blankets, shrink-wrapped for transport and storage. The medium is charcoal on bed linens, hung and draped loosely on the wall and other supports.

The project was initially conceived for an exhibition called Drawing Big; The Immediacy of Touch, curated by Artist John Tomlinson in 2015. Phillips took as her subject some of the family chairs which she brought from her mother’s recently sold apartment to her barn in upstate NY. Although concealed by the blankets, the shape and character of each of the chairs is revealed through the language of design. The range of styles–from Victorian to Modern–represent generations of women in the artist’s family. As keepers of objects and family history, women are the underlying subject of the works, and the chairs can be partially understood as portraits. Because of the fragile nature of charcoal on fabric, the drawings, like memories, may fade over time.

In the catalog for Drawing Big, writer Dominique Nahas described his impression of the shrouded forms, evoking entombment scenes from Carravaggio and Zurbaran—but also Bernini, acknowledging that “In the cloth are revealed both life and death…. The artist allows us to dwell within that mental, psychical and emotional space that is hidden beneath inert forms.”