Liz Collins's Textile Exhibition at Candice Madey Features Queer Abstraction and Open-Ended Politics

Liz Collins's exhibition Lightning Wheel at Candice Madey in New York runs from June 20 to August 2, 2024. The Brooklyn-based artist presents 12 embroideries and weavings that blend analytic energy with disco-like joy through vibrant colors and textures. A large-scale textile titled Rainbow Mountains: Storm (2024) stands three meters tall, depicting a rainbow with bands of blue, green, yellow, orange, and red over a mountainous landscape with snowy peaks and silver droplets. Smaller works include Fractured Sky (2023) with fuzzy yarn, Fission (2024) featuring beadwork rainbows, and three textiles called Lightning Wheel (2024) with sleek blue circles on stippled backgrounds. Collins's materials clash with force, resembling an erotic dance or a gay army through sequins and serpentine fibers. Her work references craft traditions and queer feminist sensibilities but resists being labeled as activist art, instead embracing abstraction and open-ended interpretation. The artist's textiles evoke the late cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz's ideas from Cruising Utopia (2009) about queerness as potentiality. Collins's shapes, colors, and textures invite unfettered readings, balancing mind and heart without fixed political declarations.