Good Children Gallery

4037 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117


 
 



 




Ways to Be True: Liz Lessner
Plan-B: Generic Art Solutions (GAS)

Opening: Saturday, February 8, 6-10 PM

Exhibition Dates: February 8 to March 2 (by appointment March 1 and 2)

Good Children Gallery is pleased to present two new exhibitions: Ways to Be True by Liz Lessner and Plan-B by Generic Art Solutions (GAS). Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, February 8th, from 6 PM to 10 PM.

Ways to Be True: Liz Lessner



Ways to Be True
Sculptural works that help the world by hiding themselves. These works emerge from the ten-year evolution of a glyph-like gestural language. This language is derived from the relational, interstitial space of two bodies gesturing. In earlier works, these transient spatial configurations were alternately concretized in gypsum and steel and abstracted into light-dispersing wall graffiti. Here they transform into rune-like figures. These new forms were derived from extra-linguistic artifacts and generated by an algorithm that uses sound as its input data. Shaped by a sonic phrase rather than explicit language, these characters are mutations of previous relational encounters and echo the process by which the nonlinguistic experience of others refracts as memory.

Speak Make
Speak Make is not a group of sculptures but the algorithm which produces them. These forms originate from sounds. An algorithm uses parameters from audio samples (which are collected by a web form on the artist’s website) to arrange a library of existing shapes initially derived from the space between two people engaged in intimate gestures.

Helps the World
Helps the World is a floor sculpture created in imagined dialogue with Bruce Nauman and his 1967 piece, The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.

I remembered only, "the true artist reveals mystic truths." The omission of ‘helps the world’ prompted me to ponder Nauman's proposition. In our landscape of networked surveillance and algorithmically weaponized data, how does the artist help? Might hiding be a better strategy than revealing?

Helps the World is a detournement wherein Nauman’s text becomes indecipherable as it transforms into an algorithmically generated language of gesture-based glyphs. The glyphs, extruded as human-scale 3D forms, are arranged in an ascending spiral on the floor. The sculpture’s totality is obscured from viewers. To understand the work, they must physically traverse the spiral.

Wall Work
The wall work, printed on aluminum, are stills from Secretions, a film made with Mat Keel, as Yes We Cannibal. The film is a sited ethnographic archive of hidings made in Grosseto, Italy in the summer of 2022. The film takes place as an event of not telling and not showing. Its scenes are never shared, only tactics for how to ensure they remain hidden and strategies for obfuscating translation.

Liz Lessner is a sculptor whose work combines traditional fabrication techniques and emerging technologies to create novel sensory experiences. She was the 2023-24 Nadine Carter Russel Endowed Chair in the School of Art at Louisiana State University and a 2019 Scholar in Residence at the CrossLab for Innovation and Prototyping at the University of Fortaleza. She was also a 2019 Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the Department of Expressions and Languages at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro as well as the CrossLab Research Group at the University of Fortaleza in Ceará, Brazil.

Lessner has had solo shows at The Front in New Orleans, LA; VisArts in Rockville, MD; Honfleur Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and Big Orbit, a Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts Project Space in Buffalo, NY. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York; Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacán, Mexico; and Everard Read’s Circa Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.

Her research into embedded electronics' ability to create novel sensory experiences has been supported by grants like the Mark Diamond Research Fund and fellowships like the Eyeo Artists Fellowship. She is the founder of the Sensory Engagement Lab, a community-based research platform that probes how novel combinations of materials and embedded electronics contribute to sensory experience. She is also a co-founder of Yes We Cannibal, the collaborative creative practice of Mat Keel and Liz Lessner. Their collaboration results in artworks, artifacts, and a relational aesthetics project in the form of a 2020-2025 Baton Rouge, LA-based experimental project space for art, performance, and social research.






Plan-B: Generic Art Solutions (GAS)



Plan B
Generic Art Solutions (GAS) hypothesizes an installation featuring a lunar lander constructed from recycled cardboard. As billionaires plan their Martian getaways, GAS poses the question: What is the rest of humanity's escape plan from this warming planet? Record storms, unprecedented floods, and historic fires are all fueled by unabashed human greed and consumption, which intensify environmental warming. Can we recycle our way out of this mess? Can we return to sender the billionaire's waste? Can we save this sinking planet? Will a cardboard escape pod make it through the atmosphere?

Generic Art Solutions' escape vehicle, Lunar Recycler 2025, is an eternally optimistic concept—a pitiable Plan B unmistakably doomed. Yet there is a certain poetry in a grand failure, where success feels just out of reach. Failure often lurks nearby, always accompanying heroic deeds, journeys, or ideas. The art of failure lies in its unresolved possibilities. Failure poses questions, not solutions, and in this way, it is a close cousin to art.

Currently, Generic Art Solutions are exhibiting the solo expo at The New Orleans Jazz Museum, Face Value: the Illusions of Power and Money. Their first solo Museum show was Déjà Vu All Over Again at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Notable group shows include Fútbol: The Beautiful Game at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, in 2014 and then in 2018 The World's Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, Préz Art Museum Miami (PAMM), FL, both curated by Franklin Sirmans, the Director at PAMM.

In 2011 Prospect founder and curator Dan Cameron included G.A.S. in Double Crescent at C24 Gallery in New York, NY. In Poland, G.A.S. have shown in In God We Trust at Zacheta National Gallery. Generic Art Solutions were invited to the Rauschenberg Residency in 2014. G.A.S.'s work can be found in the Rauschenberg Residency's collection.