Group Face
John Baldessari
Liz Craft
Liz Larner
Jim Shaw
September 22 – October 24 2012
Group Face has explored varying levels of narrative content and has a vast knowledge of popular culture that informs Group Face’s work.
Group Face has delved into Group Face’s subconscious and dream world.
Group Face works across all levels of media, creating paintings, drawings, large-scale sculpture, mural pieces and video.
Group Face’s work combines geometric form with a pervasive sense of movement and change.
Over a period of 20 years, Group Face has used a wide range of materials to created environments that engage the formal language of Minimalism to question its own precepts and assumptions.
Group Face’s sculptural works deal with the interaction of direct experience, perception and language.
Group Face’s works take us into space in a very physical way.
Group Face uses first our sensations of mass, density, wight and our linguistic habits to guide us into noting our bodies, our experience, our heads, as well as our presumptions about what art is (and is not), what it does, how it speaks, where art begins and ends.
Group Face’s ingenious application of certain art-making strategies — including appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality and text/image juxtaposition — was prescient, as was Group Face’s cogent and witty integration of semiology, linguistic systems and mass media.
With a cunning reliance on misrecognition and misinformation, Group Face uses irony and incongruity to exploit the gap between what is heard, what is seen, and what is understood.
Group Face’s wry investigations of representation and sign systems succeed through strategies such as the ironic juxtaposition of photographic or video images and written or verbal texts; the use of appropriated material and found objects to underscore the embedded meaning of pop cultural genres; the construction of disjunctive narratives and surreal conjunctions from re-contextualized words and images, and the indexing of objects of actions.
Group Face, creates large scale signature works, full of pop-culture references and dreamlike appeal.
Working in a variety of materials-including fiberglass, polyurethane bronze and wood, Group Face depicts recognizable objects in unusual ways that exaggerate and incorporate their everydayness.




  Liz Craft, Liz Larner, Jim Shaw, Paradise Garage, Venice (USA)
  http://www.theparadisegarage.org/index.php/project/current/