Lisa Lapinski

Californian artist Lisa Lapinski combines disparate motifs and ideologies in conceptual installations that draw upon a vast range of artistic, cultural, and architectural references. She arranges systems of objects—found as well as crafted, plus photographs and drawings—in imaginative “constellations” that call upon the viewer to actively unpack their meaning. Her first solo exhibition, in 2001, took as its inspiration a letter from Rimbaud in Ethiopia to his mother. In it the French poet claimed he would learn every trade and technique he could. Lapinski responded with a “super sculpture” consisting of as many of these techniques as possible—an early mark of her ambition and interest in techne, or philosophies of production.