PROGRAM DETAILS:
Date Thursday, Jan 18, 2024
Time 5-6 PM
Virtual via Zoom. Pre-registration is required for Zoom link.
Cost Free with Registration ($10 suggested donation)
In this virtual talk, artist Liz Harvey will discuss her exhibition, the lost ones: iterations and murmurs, and her work that engages with stitching as a way to deal with the bittersweet, particularly around climate disruption during the Anthropocene– the time during which humans have had a substantial impact on our planet. She’ll share how disorientation and embroidery come together as strategies to "queer" our relationship to nature. Using dance and textiles, her work often makes use of what she calls time-traveling to engage with overlooked stories as well as to envision futures centering liberation. the lost ones invited participants to embroider critically endangered flowers and plants on a garment worn by a performer in multiple outdoor performances in order to help viewers navigate yearning and melancholy.
the lost ones: iterations and murmurs is an exhibition centered on the artworks, artifacts, and ephemera behind creating the lost ones, a multi-year performance project by Bay Area artist Liz Harvey. For the lost ones performance project, Harvey worked with a range of collaborators, including choreographers Mary Armentrout, Cherie Hill, and Megan Nicely, as well as science editor Lauren Muscatine. The project featured myriad performers rotating through an embroidered performance garment on which participants were invited to stitch images of endangered plants in order to highlight overlooked species, untold feminist histories, and little-acknowledged art practices.
ABOUT LIZ HARVEY
Liz Harvey is a queer artist who makes textiles, collages, watercolor paintings, and performances in order to disorient viewers and envision speculative liberatory futures. She uses craft processes to shed light on historical erasures of queer history and plant stories. Recent work highlights embroidery, audience participation, and time travel as vehicles for exploring the impact of climate change with a focus on the exponential increase in the rate of plant extinctions. Harvey also generates imagery from discarded materials and textile surplus to create collages, banners, headdresses, and capes, including textiles “from the future.” In Harvey’s performance projects, she collaborates with choreographers and scientists, frequently bringing dancers engaging with objects to public gardens and urban spaces. Recently, her work has been shown at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, Round Weather Gallery in Oakland, Terrain Biennial in Alameda, and Plan-d Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Feral Fabric Journal, 48hills, and the San Francisco Examiner. She has been an artist-in-residence at Montalvo Arts Center, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, the de Young Museum, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and Salesforce Park in San Francisco. Harvey’s work is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and her studio is in Oakland.
