Lisa Jo | Ecology of Fear

Gallery Wendi Norris

436 Jackson Street, San Francisco

After Lisa Jo
By Dodie Bellamy

The figure takes a sip of lukewarm coffee, slopping some on the table. The viewer clenches before the figure’s sharp-edged messiness. Fed up with all the fragments and contradictions the viewer cops a feel, poking the figure’s curve with a greasy finger. To be marketable, a figure should seduce the viewer, should pretend to ignore the viewer’s invasions. This makes the figure feel like a femme, and the figure hates that. The viewer can’t reconcile how a creature with a cunt could be this intimidating. The figure sits in a midwestern cafe, eating food that’s all wrong. Horribly salty Hoppin John soup—shreds of bacon floating in a broth of lentils rather than black eyed peas. On the street lightning spastically blinks on and off, and in the distance thunder rumbles. Should a siren sound, the figure has been told, that means hide in a basement. When the figure googles if it’s safe to take a shower during a rainstorm, opinions are mixed. There’s a story of somebody washing their face in the sink when lightning strikes the house, then zaps through the plumbing, through the somebody’s body, and out their asshole. The figure pulls out a spiral-bound notebook and writes that down. In 2017 there were 16 deaths from lightning strikes, and none of the victims were bathing. In fact, all of them were outdoors, generally in open, flat areas where a standing human holding a golf club or shotgun “can be the nearest thing to a cloud.” Hanging from a vintage gold-filled chain around the figure’s neck is a Victorian baroque pearl, set horizontally in gold. The pearl is puffy and bubbled—freakish in a different context—but here a cute cumulous cloud. The pearl is paired with a late 19th Century French cross comprised of six roughly cut diamonds encased in silver. On the back is a layer of gold so no silver touches delicate flesh. The combo of cloud pearl and cross suggests Blake—a V of yellow light shoots out ancient of days dazzling the chest. The figure enjoys wearing a cross. The viewer looks at it and makes assumptions, and since the viewer tends to fear Western religion—those assumptions give the figure power. The figure thinks of it not as a cross but a crossroad. Lighting incense and a drippy indigo candle, the figure touches the necklace and summons the liminal. On the night before the new moon, the figure gathers sweepings from the kitchen floor, walks to the 3-limbed intersection at the end of the block and sprinkles the sweepings as an offering to Hecate. Hecate gobbles up refuse—the unwanted, abandoned, discarded—systems on the verge of falling apart.

Dodie Bellamy has written for numerous art magazines and catalogues. Semiotext(e) has published two collections of her essays, “When the Sick Rule the World” (2015) and “Bee Reaved” (2021). In 2023, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction.

ABOUT Lisa Jo

The work of Lisa Jo (b. 1983, Los Angeles, CA) occupies an ambiguous terrain that resists definitive categorization and insists on a tension between representation and abstraction. Born in Los Angeles, CA, the artist takes inspiration from both film noir and the glaring sunshine of Southern California, creating paintings that tap into an elusive foreboding and destabilization. The meticulously painted works generate initial impressions of flatness, which belie their intricately layered and kinetic compositions. Mediating a process of revealing and concealing, in which images appear to be on the verge of collapse, the paintings exist between recognition and cognition.

Jo’s works have been the subject of solo and two-person presentations at Paris Internationale, Paris, France (2024); Galerie Molitor, Berlin, Germany (2024); David Lewis, New York, NY (2022 and 2023); Efremedis, Berlin, Germany (2021); Braunsfelder, Cologne, Germany with Laurent Dupont (2020); and Plymouth Rock, Zurich (2019). Additionally, the paintings have also been featured in group exhibitions including Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2023); The Downer, Berlin, Germany (2021); Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, France (2019); and other galleries and institutions.

The artist currently lives and works in Berlin.