A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture
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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture |
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SEEKING LISA SOLBERG. AN ARTIST FINDS MEANING AND TRADITIONS.A Pioneer Woman with the Spirit of an Athlete Turns Inward for Meaning and Projects Outward with Confidenceby Gordy Grundy The old debate, 'Is art a religion?' always ends with a chuckle and never an answer. We do know that art can heal, motivate and inflame. Art is a lifestyle, a mantra and a coda. Art is a producer. In 2022, as New Yorkers were beginning to find a footing after the worst of the COVID pandemic, a small plane in an empty sky flew over the Hudson River pulling a banner that read “FORM IS VOID. WHAT R U WITHOUT YOUR BONES?”
Today in pop culture, we hear about the 'pioneer women,' the other sex who faced great strife with grit in the American expansion westward. I believe multidisciplinary artist Lisa Solberg is a Western woman; she certainly acts like it. The words that flew above Manhattan were an assertive reaction. While the country was experiencing a crisis of meaning after the worst pandemic since the Great Influenza of 1918, with record low trust in institutions, the loss of consensus reality and a worsening identity crisis, Lisa Solberg was charting a path forward, to turn inward for meaning and to project outward with confidence. Her “Message in the Sky” (2022) was a bold gesture.
Solberg grew up in Chicago to a family that loved the outdoors. She learned to ski early and joined the boys on the slopes. She remembers playing lookout while her dad did tricks off of boulders. Later, she began to ski professionally and helped pioneer a place for women in slopestyle, a freestyle skiing category where athletes compete on a course to earn points by performing a series of tricks off jumps and metal rails.
“These were the early years,” Solberg says. “There weren’t many competitions, and our events were never taken as seriously as the men’s. But, we had fun and helped push women’s slopestyle into the mainstream.” Solberg had always been making art and it was very much a part of her life. Her orthopedic surgeon, who would later become a collector of her work, gently suggested that she look beyond her skiing score, "You have so much more to offer." This became an invitation that changed her life. There is a spiritedness in Solberg’s art. Her paintings are large and expressive, expanding to claw at the edges as if grasping for something just beyond the canvas. While artists can easily get pigeonholed into conversations about gender, Solberg goes after the big ideas of the human experience.
Her largest work to date is 'Totem Triad' (2022), a sculptural installation on an expansive stretch of land in east Aurora, Colorado. Visible from the parkway, three large concrete and steel sculptures sit nestled among an eight-pointed structure of carved stones. Together, the components are arranged according to celestial bodies. After working on the piece as a private commission, the original buyer fell through. Rather than abandoning the project, Solberg successfully kept the project alive until a new collector was found.
While travelling the world with a backpack, Solberg fell in love with Los Angeles. Her 'L.A. Story' was glorious, busy and naturally included a bad relationship, a series of break-ins at home and studio, and a dedicated stalker. “This was really my rock bottom. It was a scary time because while we were still collectively dealing with the fallout of COVID, I had this personal chaos. It completely rattled my sense of self and led to this personal rebirth.”
“While I was trying to process that crazy time,” she said, "I started to draw these mind maps to structure how I saw my relationship to the world. These symbols just started to appear from out of nowhere. I began to understand them as representing interrelatedness, between the conscious and the subconscious, the inside and the outside, the light and dark. They really grounded me in the experience, and I eventually started to see them in everything.” Solberg recently presented her first work outside the U.S. with a pop-up event in London during Fashion Week. “Holy Pancake” is an ongoing series of small, community gatherings that celebrate tradition, warmth and the spirit of the western pioneer woman.
The 'pancake' appears in the cuisine of most cultures. Through multiple iterations in New York, “Holy Pancake” has brought together hundreds of friends, acquaintances and strangers around the proverbial table to eat pancakes cooked fresh on a cast iron skillet over a propane camping stove. As the world burns, Lisa Solberg’s art aims to be a guidepost or a talisman. Her will, transformed into self-reliance, has created a space for a gathering around the small things that help bring meaning to our every day lives: food, friends, art and fellowship.
The Work of Lisa Solberg can be found at her website, Click Here!
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“I took my art to the public instead of waiting for the public to come to the art,” she says. “People were starting to hang out in the parks again, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to share my work with the city.” Her challenging words were a reference to the Heart Sutra from Mahayana Buddhism.
Competitive slopestyle began in 1997 and has only been an Olympic event since 2014. Solberg joined the circuit when women’s slopestyle was just getting started. During her career, she participated in the X Games in Aspen and the US Open in Vail. Though she was invited twice as one of the top ten women in the sport to the World Skiing Invitational in Whistler, British Columbia, she had to sit out both times due to injuries.
The symbols in the piece are not taken from any religious or cultural tradition. They merged out of her sketchbook and months of meditative practice, which Solberg calls her “monastic year” living solo in Glassell Park, Los Angeles in 2021. 
Solberg refers to herself as a syncretist, a term used to describe the blending of diverse spiritual or religious beliefs. The premise is that all spiritual traditions point in their own way to an underlying unity of truth. 
