Charcoal on paper
Variable dimensions
206 Rogers St.
Atlanta, GA
Exhibition Description: Lisa Li is drawn to destruction, its volatility, its capacity for transformation, and the material remnants left in its wake. Volcanoes have been a persistent pull throughout her practice, a subject informed by personal experience that continues to resurface in her work.
Tephramania takes its name from tephra, the rock fragments forcibly ejected into the air during an eruption, matter violently displaced, fragmented, and redeposited. This is Li's first sustained body of two-dimensional work, extending concerns long present in her sculpture. Here, charcoal, itself matter transformed by heat, becomes the means through which she renders volcanic form.
The drawings remove that form from its surroundings entirely. There is no ground, no architecture, no figure, nothing to tell us how large the image is or where we stand in relation to it. Scale becomes unstable: a form might seem small enough to hold, monumental enough to inhabit, or vast enough to resemble terrain at a planetary scale.
That uncertainty is central to the work. In Tephramania, Li gives us something at once physical and strangely ungrounded: matter without a fixed measure, a landscape without a horizon. The drawings ask us to reconsider not only what we are looking at, but how we know its size, its distance, and ultimately our own position within it.
79 x 36 in.
charcoal on paper
37 x 36 in.
charcoal on paper
47 x 36 in.
charcoal on paper
40 x 36 in.
charcoal on paper