Fantastico

Lisa Sanditz

If truth is stranger than fiction, then Lisa Sanditz’s work published at Aurobora  serves to highlight the absurdly peculiar world in which we live.  Sanditz delves into a fuzzy region where industrial mass-market consumerism and bucolic scenery collide.  The beauty unearthed here is from the artist’s own idiosyncratic vision at once devoid of human occupation yet set among the detritus of human activity.  Sanditz’s work exposes how traditional American landscapes are being defined, manipulated, and exploited through the discarded contents of consumerism and society’s ever-increasing effluvia.

In these works on paper produced at Aurobora, Sanditz treats her images as relics—a construction crane rising in Las Vegas, an abandoned cargo van angled in front of a Santa Monica strip mall, a series of vacant parking lots that dot and link the outskirts of Atlantic City, a tug sluggishly pulling a barge of bundled waste down the Hudson, a decaying floral arrangement blooming from a trash bag— and by doing so, the artist cossets us with a homey nostalgia.  Sanditz accomplishes this through the combination of her painterly technique, dramatic scale shifts and an unexpected color palette. Couple this with the artist’s focus on the under-explored parts of contemporary society and a viewer can not help contemplate the underlying issues she tackles.