Liza Lou is a bead artist who creates entire scenes – rooms, trailers, houses, a backyard – entirely from tiny beads.

Her current show at the White Cube in the UK is “a meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the architecture of confinement” and includes a room the size of a death row prison cell, a barbed wire security fence, and several male figures in states of anguish.

From the exhibit description:

Lou’s work has an immediate ‘shock’ content that works on different levels: first, an acknowledgement of the work’s sheer aesthetic impact and secondly the slower comprehension of the labour that underlies its construction. But whereas in Lou’s earlier works the startling clarity of the image is often a counterpoint to the lengthy process of its realization, for the execution of Cell, Lou further slowed down the process by using beads of the smallest variety with their holes all facing up in an exacting hour-by-hour approach in order to ‘use time as an art material’.

Images of her earlier work can be seen here.

An interesting review of the current exhibit can also be found at the Guardian.

Via magpie and cake

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