Your Body Is a Space that Sees

This month’s LA Art feature is on Lia Halloran’s exhibit Your Body Is a Space that Sees at LAX.

Born in Chicago, IL, Lia Halloran grew up surfing and skateboarding in the SF Bay Area town of Pacifica, CA. Halloran sports an impressive series of residencies (i.e. American Natural History Museum in NY), acquisitions (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – NY, NY), publications ( The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, etc.), and solo exhibitions across the US as well as international exhibitions. 

In Your Body Is a Space that Sees, mesmerizing and yet eerily familiar, Lia Holloran exposes us to a series of accessible artworks that seem as complex as the depths of space themselves. The 2016 Art Works Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts heralded Your Body is a Space that Sees, which is now on view at LAX. The focus of the exhibition is on “Pickering’s Harem,” or later called, “Harvard Computers”: a group of women who worked at the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s – The first half of the 20th century. This group of women significantly contributed to astronomy, though have been intentionally omitted from common history.

Emblazoned in the rich cyan and annular shapes are quite literally the faces of the women who have suffered historical erasure. With their contributions absent from the history tomes, their images (and spirits it seems) are called upon to materialize. The very masking and ambiguity mimics their discarded histories, but also pique the viewer’s interest and ask to be assembled. Other artworks in the exhibition emulate biological phenomena characteristic to human cells and organic material.

Your Body Is a Space that Sees presents this lost history and credits the Harvard Computers through a series of rich depictions of interstellar objects and galactic bodies. The media itself almost mirrors that which the Harvard Computers leveraged to impact their field: photographic glass plates established classifications for size, brightness and chemical content of stars.

Halloran is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and serves as an Associate Professor of Art and the Director of the Painting and Drawing Department at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Artist:

Lia Halloran

Exhibition:

Your Body Is a Space that Sees

Location:

LAX

Terminal 1, Gate 9, post-security