On view in Thinkspace's project room is CDMX, featuring new works by French-Italian, Los Angeles-based artist Liz Brizzi. Drawn to the momentums of recession and dissipation that shape the physical character of city streets over time, Brizzi's refined mixed media technique combines the hauntings of photography with the impressionistic intercessions of paint to produce ambiguously merged dimensions of time and space.
With selective omissions and emphases in her imagery, Brizzi interprets the photograph with stylistic and poetic introjections, refusing it the neutrality of an unmitigated document, and pushing and pulling its edges from the brink of abstraction. Her works subtly dramatize the erasure and preservation invisibly at work in not only our subjective attempts to remember our experience of time and place but in the living character and ephemerality of cities - forever the subject of interpretation and vague longings but seldom satisfied through literal articulation. Brizzi's works capture something determinative and essential in the individual cores of cities - in the transience of their poetry and in the impossible task of freezing the living bones of their history in intangible progress. Both haunting and immersive, Brizzi's cityscapes are full of the imperfect poetry and ruinous stirrings that make the study of erosion a more compelling pursuit than that of the pristine.
An avid traveler, who is always in search of poignant pause and solace in the midst of the frenetic urban fray, Brizzi documents and explores the character of a location, seeking its histories and stories in the edges and details, contrasts and tensions, that impress a place's soul upon an observer's memory. From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Brizzi's work is based on an exploratory impulse, a desire to lose oneself in the anonymity of frozen observation. With works conspicuously devoid of human subjects, but rather filled with the traces of their work, life, and intervention, the images hover strangely in a register of heavy absence - strung somewhere between the empirically reliable and the poetically sapient.
In CDMX, Brizzi looks to Mexico City's venerable history, architecture, and street life for the first time, creating works based on her recent travels and photographs there. Capturing her living impressions of its textures, light, and urban anatomy, Brizzi arrests a breathing world in a state of temporary Athanasia.
