R O U N D W E A T H E R
R O U N D W E A T H E R
Leeza Doreian & Liz Harvey: Material Conditional
November 5 - December 27, 2022
Reception: Saturday Nov. 5, 2 - 5 PM
Wear Out: Free Mending Workshop w/ Doreian & Harvey:
Saturday Dec. 3, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Round Weather is ever-so pleased to present Leeza Doreian & Liz Harvey: Material Conditional. Select and recent artworks range from paintings of garments to fabric prints with focuses that move like light through a prism on their materials, the conditions of living and loving, and the spectrum between human and nature. Doreian and Harvey are proud members of communities who are far too often disregarded and mistreated: the queer, the disabled, the makers of art. Their work welcomes us to regard how group-based aspects of identity might inflect attention, sensibility, method, and meaning while it also invites viewers into the artists’ individual relationships with worlds natural, formal, industrial, and handmade.
Doreian and Harvey serve as the current two members of Mending Collective, "creating space for people to come together to learn and practice visual mending techniques." Their show Material Conditional is in well-trimmed keeping with Mending Collective’s consideration of "consumption and waste, specifically within the garment industry, but indicative of production in general." Art can help us mend the social fabric. We all form the material of culture, of interwoven cultures. And too many of our conditions have yet to be met. Art can be made and sold to serve us all. Art is a place where you may love your neighbor as yourself. Love, like the art in this show, can be realistic, representational, abstract–and true love often must be conditional.
30% of proceeds from artwork in Leeza Doreian & Liz Harvey: Material Conditional will be donated to climate crisis mitigation via the nonprofits Honor the Earth, Oil Change International, and Sunrise Movement. Doreian and Harvey's websites, including bios, are at leezadoreian.com and lizharveystudio.com. Below sample artworks, you’ll find their Artist's Statements.
Leeza Doreian
My work synthesizes the delicate negotiation between the sensory experiences of the body and the cognitive ordering needed to process them. With a focus on systems and webs of connection, I address nuance, intimacy, iteration, time, neurodiversity and liminal realms. Pattern is integral both in form and content, acting as structure and metaphor to create a place where sensuality and order meet.
Used, mass-produced fabric items inspire carefully crafted works in oil or gouache, countering the ever-increasing pace in which these types of items are produced and consumed. As an act of reverence, each item is painted to scale. In Time and Repetition focuses on four items: a polyester shirt, a polyester skirt, a woven skirt, and a tablecloth. Painted between 2010 and 2022, this work initiates my practice of offering sustained attention in response to economic models dependent on escalating consumption and waste. For Indigo Rising, painted between 2016-2018, a blue polyester shirt serves as still life material for thirteen gouache paintings, which together portray a waxing and waning moon. This act of weaving together the perceptual and sensual with the conceptual and quantitative is one of my recurring artistic impulses.
It is my hope that the unseen labor of thought, combined with my labor-intensive process, will produce works with a particular materiality, so that meaning can unfold slowly over time. A fundamental concern is how we, as humans, experience, understand, and impact the world around us. The paintings, balanced between representation and abstraction, recast what may otherwise be overlooked as banal into singular poetic experience.
Liz Harvey
I am a queer artist who works with textiles, collage, and performance in ways that disorient viewers while pointing to queer and environmental liberatory futures.
Queer is a state of being “both/and” and occupies an unfixed, indeterminate, in- between space. In Ellipses, a series of collages started during lock-down, I focus on in-between-ness, zooming in on gaps.
I start with found paper–advertising, mostly, with high intensity color–with the words cut away to create negative space and then layer those matrices to reference structures and systems that are collapsing, all the while employing a maximalist approach. The more stripped-down Project Arp collages are made from chance processes applied to photographs I took of Oakland gardens, interrogating the use of chance and abstraction as gateways to a transformed world.
In Drizzle and golden dunes, I stitch zippers into expansive wall-hung constructs. Drizzle’s dripping forms emphasize processes from craft and cooking, both labors long associated with women’s roles. golden dunes responds to the invisible topography of the once-expansive, undulating dunescape that underlies today’s Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, drawing attention to that which has been erased.
In Yellow Shift and Red Shift, banners that put a queer spin on stitched samplers, my collage works undergo further iterations. Collages are translated into digital prints on linen and further layered with zippers to reference cryptic text. Each banner features an excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s little-known letters to her beloved, Susan Gilbert, that spell out her passionate yearning for time together.
Currently, I am collaborating with choreographer Kim Ip on Queer Ecologies: Stitching to a New Sparkle,
a performance project that explodes binaries of “human/not-human” and “natural/unnatural.” In conjunction with the project, I make collages that inform textiles that call up a speculative future.