Michael Slenske writes on Lita Albuquerque’s artwork Liquid Light in Los Angeles Magazine.
Lita started her career as a prominent figure in L.A.’s Light and Space movement and, for decades, she has made iconic performative land-art works all over the globe, from the Washington Monument to Antarctica. She started working on the astronaut in Liquid Light—the second part of an ongoing trilogy—in 2003, the year she says she first received “a visitation” from the film’s otherworldly being. But her narrative journey into the interstellar axis, which she captured in a work that was later stolen, titled Abhasa: image-bearing light, began when she was pregnant with Jasmine in 1983. “The story really started then, with a cosmic couple in space,” she says of her initial vision, which became her inspiration. “There was a projection of my pregnant belly in the star system and, from there, it just goes on to destruction.”
Like the Incan creation myth of humanity rising from the depths of Lake Titicaca, where part of the movie was shot, this phoenix of an artwork rose from the ashes of Lita’s archive and took on a life of its own this summer; it premiered at the 59th Venice Biennale as one of its collateral events and runs through November. There, the film is presented as part of an installation, projected on multiple screens in a brick-vaulted building where gondolas were once constructed. Glass orbs filled with honey from local beekeepers (used because bees pollinate with the rising of certain stars) are scattered around the room and surrounded by sprays of gold leaf, a material Lita has long employed in the concave disks of her beloved Auric Field paintings.
Read more in Los Angeles Magazine.
