Liza Lou at Deitch Projects - New York

In her astonishingly labor-intensive previous works, Liza Lou dazzled viewers with meticulously beaded life-size replicas of suburban settings--a full-scale kitchen complete with running water and dirty dishes, a backyard lawn with picnic table and barbecue. In such works, the serene surface of domestic placidity is only occasionally ruffled by dissonant details: Lou presents a world that is as familiar as it is banal.

In her new installation, the beads' feminine connotations run deliberately counter to the unvarnished masculinity of the main event--an aluminum Airstream trailer whose interior is littered with beaded girlie magazines, hunting knives, bottles of Jack Daniel's, fishing boots and guns. The otherwise faithfully re-created trailer furniture and retro accessories are realized in beads restricted to a subdued pattern of gray and brown, designed, it turns out, to suggest the grisaille palette of film noir. The installation must be viewed by craning one's head across the threshold. This allows for only a partial glimpse of the distant bedroom strewn with clues to some cinematic drama. The sounds of a television, which seems tuned to a crime movie, play across an obstructed vision of a rumpled bed, a supine leg and a discarded handgun.

Outside the trailer, we returned to Technicolor, as spotlights picked out beaded objects scattered around an otherwise darkened gallery space: a nasty-looking German shepherd, a campfire glittering with brilliant orange and yellow flames, and a startling life-size figure of a man falling backward as a dove emerges from his mouth.

Titled "Testimony," the show as a whole played on a double reference to church and court, suggesting the two sides of the Bible Belt culture from which the artist herself emerged. The man, literally touched by the Holy Spirit, evidences the euphoric release provided by religion, while the accessories within the trailer suggest that similar effects may be achieved through sex, violence and liquor. Meanwhile, the snarling dog and fire amplify the sense of irrational forces at work in the world.

Downstairs, another beaded installation underscored the dualities referenced here. A young girl in a ruffled white Communion dress lies face up in a coffinlike box, her face and upraised hands emerging from what appears to be a pool of water. Her status is ambiguous: is she dead, or born again? Is she undergoing baptism or burial?

"Testimony" elicited the viewer's astonishment at the sheer amount of work involved in creating these beaded extravaganzas. But it also went deeper, touching on the mysterious sources of religion, desire and ecstasy.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group