Tucson-based artist Lizz Denneau’s sumptuous and extravagant creations force us to reckon with their simultaneous beauty and horror.
Lizz Denneau relishes those minute details that make viewers savor a work of art. From sculptures adorned with delicate, pearl-like beads to sprawling and intricately detailed embroidery that tells a story on its surface, her work invites us to ruminate on the craft and symbolism contained in infinite detail. She uses media to create conceptual layers of meaning, crafting boundless feasts of activity in visual form that contain elements of both beauty and horror. This multiplicity and richness of material recall her time as a fashion designer. Her installations comprise found objects, pulled apart and rearranged to symbolize the disruptions of history and capitalism.
Her work creates aesthetic juxtapositions that force us to acknowledge the rot of racial injustice that lies beneath the carefully curated veneer of American society. Denneau’s practice explores “the relationship historical racism has with the development of respectability politics and its reverberations through the Black female body,” according to her artist statement.
They will never pick you (2023) features a pristine, white Fisher Price dollhouse on a doily platform pillared by glass bottles, each bearing a racist caricature. The piece recalls the metaphor Isabel Wilkerson uses in her groundbreaking book Caste (2020) of America as an old house that society has inherited and which we have a collective duty to both recognize and maintain, flaws and all.
Denneau, who graduated from the University of Arizona with her BFA in art and visual culture education, also recently earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work invests in narrative, drawing from personal and global history to express diverse themes of identity, memory, and race through a variety of media. One can see how her work as an educator and researcher would inform this practice, as each piece inhabits such richness of symbolism and story.
Tucson, Arizona | lizzdenneau.com | @lizz_denneau
