Liz Scheer

Galerie Shibumi is pleased to present the gallery's representation of painter Liz Scheer (b. Texas, 1990).

Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche has said that a knife becomes sharp as the result of “two exhaustions” --the exhaustion of the sharpening stone and the exhaustion of the metal. In the same way, he continues, “enlightenment is the result of the exhaustion of obscurations and the exhaustion of the antidote of obscurations.” Liz Scheer sharpens the knife of her ‘painting- poems’ by rubbing together two disparate narratives (one visual and one verbal) that have respectively “maxed out” their claims to reality. By pairing small jewel-toned paintings with patches of fiction pulled from a nonexistent ur-text, Scheer’s work portrays the unexpected clarity that arises in moments of spiritual depletion. Through its uncanny iconography born from New Age paraphernalia and the culture of New England and the Midwest, Scheer’s work portrays a kind of quotidian transcendence suffused with poignancy and humor.

The exhibition features an artist talk with Meghan O'Gieblyn. She is the author of God Human Animal Machine and Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. She writes essays and criticism for Harper's, The New Yorker, WIRED, Bookforum, n+1, The New York Review of Books, and other publications, and is the recipient of the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The exhibition takes its name from a play by Annie Baker, which features a (fictional) video game, Nocturama. In the final level of Nocturama, the player travels to the core of the world to kill an evil sorceress.

When the sorceress dies, she melts away and turns into a little boy lying on the ground. The ultimate mission of the game is to take the dead child in one’s arms and to absorb his curse so that he can live again. Scheer’s work invites us to see art in general–and fiction in particular–as this kind of virtual reality experience.

As a mechanism for both escape and penetration, fiction can simultaneously transport us off of the earth and into life’s very ‘core,’ cueing us to truths buried in ordinary experiences.

Like the player of Nocturama, the mission of the artist and writer might be to ‘absorb’ pain and to help other people come back to life from all kinds of spiritual death. In these luminous paintings–each accompanied by a caption and mostly no larger than a record sleeve–Scheer exalts in the life-saving capacities of narrative-construction, while also basking in the humor and joy that occasionally arises in the event of its failure.