Art

The magical mysteries that Erika Lizee creates are grounded in flora and fauna, floating in an almost celestial light. Both alien and completely rooted in nature, Lizee takes viewers into a wonderful realm that is both literally and emotionally multi-dimensional in installations that merge with walls and create their own space, as well as with perfectly detailed drawings rich with depth, and paintings that pull viewers into her intricate world, mesmerizing world.

Regardless of medium, Lizee is creating her own forms of nature. As she puts it, “With an ever-shifting and nebulous boundary between what is known and unknown, our limited understanding of life is constantly in flux.” She goes beyond the known, shifting not only her own perception of the real world, but ours.

While this sounds like a weighty accomplishment – and most assuredly it is – Lizee’s work has a light touch. One can enjoy looking at her beautiful wall art or stepping into a transformed installation space by simply appreciating and absorbing the wonderful colors and details of her art and its intrinsic loveliness. Or, one can consider the meaning of what she has done. “Creative and innovative thinking pushes the boundaries of what exists and what is accepted. The strange becomes familiar through the passage of time and the acquisition of knowledge,” she explains.

Essentially offering a portal into a new artistic dimension, Lizee’s art seems to literally come alive.

“I build my installations from the idea that gallery walls can serve as symbolic thresholds between life and death, between what is known and unknown,” the artist says.

Trompe l’oeil and sculptural paintings tell creation stories; there is something spiritual and deeply alive about her work, something primal and filled with inchoate longing. The flip side of that – and what allows that mystical quality to exist – is Lizee’s precise attention to detail, an imagined new reality that is blossoming with intimate, tangible qualities that together produce a visceral world.

Her monochromatic drawings are swirled and dream-like as Lizee creates graphite on paper works that are shimmery with motion.  In “Together Our Intentions Go Stronger,” two floral images surge forward together, their petals flaming behind them like the tails of comets. “Intricate Flow” gives us jelly-fish-like creatures streaming upward, carried by an invisible, surging wave.

Her paintings are similarly filled with motion and fuse nature with a celestial quality of light and perfect, repeating patterns.

With “Early Signs of the Continuum,” the artist gives us a purple flower that is literally bursting with life, ribbons and filaments emanate from its center, swirling and coiling like smoke behind it.

In “Prime Infusion,” a vivid fuschia flower pours forth this same swirling, curving substance, a stand-in, perhaps for life itself, breath, and being.

The Wisconsin-born Lizotte says she spent her childhood “discovering nature…I have a particularly vivid memory of studying the unfurling coils of a fiddlehead fern, and finding the mystery and beauty of this event to be a moving experience.”

In both her drawings and canvas paintings, the images are seemingly in motion, their innate energy palpable.

Even more dramatic are the artist’s often room-size installations. Working in purples and blues and silvers, and in clear Duralar orbs with floral-like painted pieces suspended inside, Lizee’s work feels fully formed, as if her drawings and paintings had merged into 3-D, living entities.

Take the rich dark sea blue of “Seed of Life,” at the Vita Art Center in Ventura. The fecund midnight blue twists and snakes, an alien being both plant-like and sentient, spilling from the wall in acrylic and Duralar like a restless sea.

She has created a portion of her work on the gallery wall, the doorway or portal into three dimensional elements that could be ocean or tissues, geometric patterns, blossoming seeds.

In a recent installation at LAAA’s Gallery 825, “Eternally Searching,   (0,1,1,1,3,5,8,13)” the work is as enigmatic as it is soaring. Here, Lizee calls up the mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci numbers, which visually appear as the Golden Spiral, the centerpiece of this work of art, and a clue to the existence of the universe.

Her fluid work flows from painted acrylic on the gallery wall to suspended sculptural painted pieces that emerge from it, including small, clear Duralar orbs what contain floral images inside them, as if they were seed pods or embryos. Again, Lizee’s work has an other-worldly essence that offers a compelling argument to search for meaning beyond our own world.

Installations at Art Share LA, BLAM Los Angeles, and at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, similarly invoked mysteries, and majestic, alchemical images that are both visually attractive and absorbing.

Whether one is studying a graphite drawing, a richly colored painting, or participating in the experience of one of Lizee’s encompassing installations, the end result is to be transported. Viewers will come away from an encounter with Lizee’s art with an expanded sense of vision and wonder: of the smallest seed or flower writ large, of the soaring universe suddenly within reach.

• Genie Davis; photos: courtesy of the artist and Genie Davis