New York, NY | Artist Talk: Liz Collins, Lightning Wheel at Candice Madey

About the Exhibition: Candice Madey is thrilled to announce the gallery’s second exhibition with Liz Collins, Lightning Wheel, presenting a series of new textile-based works that explore the artist’s distinctive and evolving symbology through recurring patterns and forms. Collins’s abstractions verge on the fantastical or energetic, suggesting the effects of extraordinary natural phenomena and a rapidly changing environment on the artist’s interior world.

As in Collins’s past work in textile, installation, drawing, and design, recent works employ a vibrant color spectrum that incorporates queer feminist sensibilities as well as references to twentieth-century abstraction in painting and in fiber. Reflecting the artist’s interest in Theosophist visual and spiritual traditions, the imagery investigates the idea that the occult movement is an esoteric predecessor of—or a link to—the origins of modern abstraction.

Central to the exhibition is a large-scale tapestry in which rainbows traverse sky and mountainscapes. The work is part of a series of woven landscapes entitled Rainbow Mountains that evoke the inner turmoil of an artist-activist in this contemporary moment–a consciousness at once hopeful, utopic, apocalyptic, and sublime. The exhibition’s title, Lightning Wheel, references one of several forms that reappear alongside lightning bolts, spheres, and cracked mirrors. Collins frequently crafts multiple iterations of her enigmatic compositions in different color combinations, materials, and fabrications in woven, embroidered, and embellished textiles, compounding and building her cosmology and iconographic vocabulary through repetition and the handmade.

Collins’s work powerfully testifies to artists’ agency in creating new worlds. By reconfiguring symbols, patterns, shapes, forms, colors, and textures, she seeks to better understand the human spirit in an uncertain and ever-changing ecosystem.