Liz Linden “Damaged Goods”

Cleopatra's

This event has ended.

…the world is already becoming more homogenous through the repetition and proliferation of the signs of culture, therefore it is inevitable that people in various cultures could be induced to want the same brands and products… the penetration of the image is so deep and so effective that it has evacuated cultural distinctions among local consumers….

—Brian Wallis, Damaged Goods (cat.), 1986

Damaged Goods is a solo exhibition of works by Liz Linden that deal with appropriation and text. Linden makes works out of the artifacts of commercial culture, often placing conflicting value systems brought together by globalization into high relief and tracing persistent stereotypes and tropes as they travel across contexts. She works in a variety of media.

The eponymous body of work that takes up the walls in the Damaged Goods exhibition is a selection from a new series of large-scale prints, Damaged Goods covers (2016), each presenting a book from Linden’s ongoing collection of different publications bearing the same “Damaged Goods” title. She began collecting of these books in 2014 when she went looking for a copy of the catalogue for an early exhibition on appropriation titled Damaged Goods, which was curated by Brian Wallis at the New Museum in 1986. While that catalogue proved hard to find, other books by that name were not; Linden’s collection of these books, most often from romance, memoir or self-help genres, currently numbers more than twenty. The prints, at 72 by 44 inches, dwarf the viewer, rendering their titular female characters larger-than-life.

The exhibition also includes a new neon text work, lookalikes (2017) and serves as the book launch for an artist’s book titled Target Practice (2016). Doubling as a monograph on Linden’s work by fictional author “Jessica Michael,” Target Practice is both of and about Linden’s work with appropriated text.

Liz Linden is an artist based in New York City and New South Wales, Australia. She was born in 1980 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a BA in Literature from Yale University and was a studio artist in the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2008 to 2009. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Art at the University of Wollongong in Australia. In addition to her present solo show at Cleopatra’s, Linden is currently exhibiting a number of works with her frequent collaborator Jen Kennedy at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.