You Can't Fall Off the Floor

Linda Warren Gallery

1052 W. Fulton Market St., Chicago, IL 60607

June 25, 2010 - August 21, 2010

by Mia DiMeo, August 16, 2010

“Sit down, this may take a while,” warns a small string of words on YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR, a 14-foot long installation work that lends its title to Lora Fosberg’s third solo show at the Linda Warren Gallery.

It can be difficult to “read” art in a gallery for more than few minutes, too many words with too much content can drown the visual impact of a piece of art. But Fosberg’s text-heavy collage pieces are an exception. More organized than chaotic, they maintain a powerful aesthetic effect that keeps me reading. True, it might take a while, but I can’t get enough of Fosberg’s collection of quips and musings, where the text is part of the visual impact. 

Laura Fosberg. YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR. 2010. Gouache and paper mounted directly on the wall.  Image used by permission of Linda Warren Gallery.

YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR takes the form of a monumental temple frieze of amassed phrases with a sprinkling of images, the lines plucked from life and deftly scripted in gouache on handmade paper. Fosberg individually applies each small strip of paper to the wall, changing the composition and adding new phrases with each installation. In fact, when she remakes the piece for Grand Rapid’s ARTPRIZE competition in September, it will double in size.

Cliché, proverbial, tongue-in-cheek, pessimistic, optimistic, matter-of-fact, ironic, romantic, broken-hearted; Fosberg regurgitates phrases from the omnipresent media, as well as notes from random life experiences. She told me when I spoke with her last year that her text works are a portrait “from the air of now… a snippet of time through the lens of me.”

Personal as that may sound, I think her work is attractive to a wide audience because of its emotional universality and reoccurring self-deprecating humor.  Like a nudge from a friend at a bar, I’m reminded of a simple truth in large blue letters, “Desperate is not a sexual preference.” Sure, it’s laughable, but realizations like this one, in a world of information overload, are what form the core of Fosberg’s work.

The freshest of Fosberg’s work are three collaborative pieces with Liza Berkoff; black and white photos of quiet urban landscapes that could be nowhere or anywhere, sharply interrupted by Fosberg’s paper and gouache bands of color. InYes Can Be Such a Surprise a rainbow searchlight seems to explode from the head of a slouched homeless man.DARE TO FAIL, is another altered city scene, where billboards are replaced with Fosberg’s painted slogans—what strikes me as campy inspirational phrases like “Believe in Believing,” that read as if they are pulled from posters in a high school guidance office.  Not that this is a bad thing—it’s good to see some sweet mixed in with all of Fosberg’s tartness.

In fact, the artist loves the environment as much as she loves phrases. The show includes a body of linocuts that are about destruction of nature, bulldozers mauling forests; destruction by nature, a giant cyclone full of cartoonish trees, furniture, and people; and a general celebration of nature, cutesy summer camp-like scenes in the woods, and a lone figure in a canoe. They have an activist bend with the irony that Fosberg excels at, but stay far away from becoming preachy hippy art.

Before I leave the gallery I stop in front of prints of tall tree trunks that dominate the wall, as close to life-sized as Fosberg can get in the space.  Charming with their individual knots and grain, each “tree” is printed and collaged on earthtoned canvas to create a small environment in the gallery, showing Fosberg’s skill as a printmaker and her knack for powerful presentation. The roots coming out of the ground look a bit like legs, and a certain melancholy falls over  me when I read the title, Right Before No More. Fosberg doesn’t do coy, not even with a simple image of a row of tree trunks, and it consistently works for her.