Lisa Anne Auerbach
Find Your Inner Metal Voice, 2011 and Crystal Energy, 2014 are both made using a knitting machine, presented in the style of a traditional painting which offers a semi-mechanical finish and, like her jumpers, combines craft, politics and text.
In Crystal Energy, Auerbach has isolated various insights offered to her by psychics she personally met with, reproducing them as graphic speech bubbles which appear like a mind map, or as thoughts, out of context, the way they might pop up in your brain. The statements at first read as a fun, ingenuous collage of ‘empowering’, self-help style messages, but after a second reading they begin to feel like hollow clichés rather than genuine empathetic guidance.
This is partly due to their uniform writing style and the harshness of the black and white, which reduces the sincerity of the words, replacing their emotional content with a confrontational authority. Like Richard Prince’s ‘joke’ paintings, Auerbach has made seemingly light-hearted statements anonymous and questionable.
Text by Gemma de Cruz
Lisa Anne Auerbach started using knitting as a means to ‘write’ bumper sticker style slogans directly onto woollen jumpers to create both an artwork and a wearable, topical statement. Through the process of knitting, her words form an integral part of the final structure rather than being painted or printed on to an existing support, (be it a canvas or a t-shirt), allowing the art and the words to be interwoven as one and the same.