DARKNESS AND LIGHT: In the Art of Susan Feldman, S.C. Mero, Laurie Lipton, and Lili Lakich
Laurie Lipton, Lili Lakich, Susan Feldman, and S.C. Mero awaiting the Darkness and Light Opening Night
Four women with long and illustrious art careers, with robust historical and present-day foundations in the downtown art world—worlds, really—of the last decades. Four women who diverge in style, medium, and intention, but all of whom don’t so much make their art as build it—out of literally millions of tiny graphite marks, out of salvaged materials and utopian dreams, out of site-responsive punster-ism and social critique, out of literal bars of light. Four women with terrific senses of humor. Four women who wield the powers of light and darkness with the deep understanding that “darkness and light” can and does mean so many different things—a visual descriptive, the building blocks of technique, kinds of comedy, and a metaphor for mood, time, spirit, self, magic, the heart and mind, life and death…
Laurie Lipton makes drawings—graphite on paper scenes of often monumental scale, rich with intense detail, surreal wit, emotional inventiveness, and an unflinching regard for the underlying truth. Her pictures are not pretty, but they are awe-inspiring; her technique is so advanced it’s almost theatrical—and indeed the visceral impact of her visions, which challenge the psyche even as they delight the eye and tease the mind. With influences from the Old Masters to underground comics, Lipton builds cinematic scenes, characters, and settings in which hyper-real and stylized narratives lampoon the many and varied dysfunctions of our society. For someone who enjoys lambasting religious dogma, various kinds of stinging hypocrisy, misogyny, corruption, climate change, fascism, and stupidity, her imagination and boundlessly dark sense of humor have had plenty of material to work with these past several years, to say the least, and she’s been at it nonstop, just like she has been for decades.
Mixed media artist Susan Feldman is known for additive sculptures and mixed media constructions infused with an expressionistic idea of architecture; even her landscape painting-based wall works are dimensional, planar, and rich in materials, gestures, details, and inventions. She loves wood, especially the reclaimed, rescued, and repurposed. With no shortage of string, rope, old photographs, tinted plexiglass, a truly vast archive of eccentric found objects, schematic lines, and vibrant colors—not to mention a love for cheeky linguistic and visual puns—she both remembers and invents artifacts of place with a folkloric soul. In her sprawling gesamtkunstwerk My Own City, she brings all her tools to bear on a labor of world-building. Both simplified and sophisticated, with moments of illusion and beguiling sleights of scale, the structures in her town are iconic and familiar, intuitive and naive, confident and lowkey hilarious.
S.C. Mero is perhaps best known for her sculptural interventions in both interior and outdoors public spaces, on the theory that anything and anywhere can be art in the right hands. From small-scale scenes that reward those who look closer to large-scale monuments to everyday surrealism, she’s just as happy setting up miniature dioramic scenes in a pothole as she is piercing the ground with the undulations of a sea monster or turning an empty storefront into a life-size cabinet of curiosities. Something catches her eye, an idea takes hold in her mind, and anything goes. Mero’s Dark Americana series, in which she engineers 100,000+ pennies, also transforms overlooked places and things into affecting narratives, but with a more somber perspective. Creating portraits of Lincoln or a distraught Uncle Sam, or terrifying scenes from 9/11 by painstakingly gathering, burnishing, and transforming specifically undervalued bits of actual money, these shiny copper nothings come represent the hollow soul of capitalism and the secret at its heart—that it’s all an illusion. She’s excited to show them in a gallery above a semi abandoned and definitely not haunted bank vault.
Lili Lakich has dedicated her six-decade art career to the revitalization, preservation, expansion, and celebration of neon art and what it can be. In 1981, Lakich founded the Museum of Neon Art (MONA) in the Arts District (it’s now located in Glendale), where her masterpiece—a seismic take on the Mona Lisa—graced its frontage until 1999. (This iconic work is currently on view in LA Louver’s 50th anniversary show, honoring Lakich’s solo exhibitions there in the 1976 inaugural, and again in 1977.) Lakich’s vision is thoroughly grounded in a unique duality that both embraces the fascination with neon as a vintage commercial flourish, both exciting and nostalgic, as well as its historically untapped (though it’s ubiquitous these days) potential as a fine art medium expressing another side to the soul of modernity. In a fusion of message and medium, across bright colors, fires of light, fine lines, and architecturally engaged scale, Lakich’s objects and images are experienced as much as seen, built as much from their own luminosity as from the sculptural structure of their shadows.
—Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2025
