SULK CHICAGO is delighted to present:

LIZA JO EILERS
THE CARE AND KEEPING OF YOU
Opening Friday, October 14, 7 to 10 pm.

Liza Jo Eilers (b. 1993 St. Paul, MN) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She uses painting, collage, sculpture and found objects to work through the inevitable double stake of how popular culture represents women, and its tendency to simultaneously resist and reinforce dominant ideals and values. Eilers is obsessed with the Bimbo’s power, which is heavily rooted in the failure of our society to see her hybridity. Because if we take a moment to look beyond her T&A and pretty face, the Bimbo serves as a particularly dangerous member of the resistance because she is already inside the system: a kind of erotic ghost that paradoxically works to undercut patriarchal forces. Eilers often humorously casts this discussion in terms of male dominated hobbies and spaces like sports fishing, hot rods, the man cave and the bar.

Eilers graduated with a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020 and a BA in Industrial Design from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. Eilers has an upcoming solo show ‘The Care and Keeping of You’ at SULK in Chicago, IL (October 2022) and recent solo exhibitions include ‘SLUDGE’ at Rainbo Club presented by M. LeBlanc in Chicago, IL (2021) and ‘Good Friday’ (2021) at Bubblez Gallery in Chicago, curated by Lauren Sullivan and Tyson Reeder. Recent group exhibitions of Eilers’ work include ‘So You Thought This Would Be Easy’ (2022) at Weatherproof in collaboration with Kiki and Bouba Gallery in Chicago, IL; ‘Wow, Nice!’ (2022) at Racecar Factory in Indianapolis, IN; ‘NICE WORK’ (2021) curated by Jake Fagundo at SULK in Chicago, IL; ‘Long Hello’ (2020) at Green Gallery in Milwaukee, curated by Carter Foster; and ‘With A Capital P: Selection by Six Painters’ (2019) at the Elmhurst Art Museum, curated by José Lerma.

ON CARE AND KEEPING

PornHub’s 2021 year-in-review reveals our top searches by state. In Ohio, it was cougar. Huge boobs took first place in Colorado while Oklahoma preferred natural tits. In New Jersey, Femdom; South Dakota, sex doll; Washington, double penetration; BBW in West Virginia, and lesbian yoga in Illinois.¹ Fantasies about women, women and other women, and what women do when they are alone has, for centuries, created categories that include and transcend those distinguished by porn websites. While there is no explicit category for Bimbo, since the ‘80s, she has been understood as a wildly attractive and sensuous blonde. Is she an airhead, a damsel in distress, a pair of tits, a bitch, a joke–or is she just hotter and smarter than you’ll ever be? 

Liza paints screenshots she’s taken of Barb (Pamela Anderson) in scenes from Barb Wire and Sheri Ann (Jennifer Coolidge) in Best in Show. Their bright green skin is perfectly smooth and without pores. The green is like the hue used in popular depictions of witches post-1939 when the innovatively colorized Wizard of Oz solidified our current iconography. Interestingly, the green paint used on the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) was copper-based–– toxic as arsenic– and Margaret suffered first-degree burns during the infamous Munchkin fire. The green paint had to be rubbed off with alcohol, and her skin took three months to recover. While healing, Margaret quit the liquid-only diet that insured her green makeup wouldn’t poison her during filming. Margaret has only 12 minutes of screen time, but her skin stayed green for weeks after the movie wrapped. Painful and tedious is our care and keeping. 

Disembodied expressions are stationed around the outboard boat motor in reverent precession. They maintain easy identification despite being stripped of their most relevant assets. Liza presents portraits, just the head, but does the idea of the subject’s body remain visualized in our mind’s eye? After all, we, the judge and the jury are constantly bombarded with depictions of their most feminine assets.² Is it possible to deobjectify a sex icon, a woman whose place in the cultural ether is inseparable from her body, when she is only depicted from the neck up? Jennifer and Pamela’s faces hover just out of focus beyond flat frames of hair. With tits, ass, and blonde manes omitted from view, do Jennifer and Pamela’s shapely silhouettes linger, bouncing their way through our shared consciousness? Is this reaction similar to how it is difficult to seperate Barb, the mercenary, from Pam, the erotic commodity? Her titular role resists any overtly sexual positioning, but we cannot help but draw our own conclusions about Barb Wire. Meanwhile, Sheri Ann projects her split consciousness onto her dog.³ The doubling serves as a reminder that the Bitch and the Bimbo are subversive in their own ways, camouflaged in plain sight, playing by their own rules. 

Pamela, Jennifer, and the rest of us learn through everyday encounters that women are largely made up and made up: leg hair, arm hair, no hair; contour, lip liner, lip gloss; eye cream, filler, nose jobs; silicone, waxes, and bleach are all used to aid in the ridiculous assumption that women are eternally young and fuckable. Liza suggests that it is not the Bimbo’s makeup, or the success to which it crystalizes her girlish features, that mobilizes her power but the acknowledgment of her complex identity. 

Like Barb and Sheri Ann, expectations can always be subverted. Take, for example, the boat motor spotlighted in the middle of the gallery.⁴ Ms. Run Her Up (Tailgating With the Enemy) is ninety nine years old, yet she is a near taxidermy of her youth.⁵ She’s shamelessly high-maintenance. Liza tediously gave Ms. Run Her Up a new manicure––a fresh paint job.⁶ While she chose to darn a new color of blush, the decals do not entirely conceal her dings or camouflage the wrinkles in her aluminum; she acknowledges her history and treats aging like any other accessory. Yes, she is made up. But she’s made herself real.⁷

1. MILF was the third most watched category in 2021. The same year, step-mom ranked as the 12th most searched term, tied with tits of course, and searches for mature milf rose in popularity by 445%.

2. The history of erotic depictions pertaining to women date back to as early the Paleolithic era where female genetalia were graphically rendered in cave paintings.  The Sumerians engraved the female form engaged in the missionary position in gemstones as early as 2000 B.C. while the Babalonians carved women in terracotta sipping beer from a straw while being penetrated from behind. The aesthetic pursuit of eroticism seems to seeps out of our very nature, but the line where art and pornography have met, and diverged, is largely historical- each time and place at once including, excluding, and transcending what it means to eroticize and to desire.

3. Sheri Ann, appears to be the intellectually vacant trophy wife of a wealthy and elderly gentleman, but finds love instead with her show dog’s trainer, Christy Cummings (Jane Lynch). Sheri Ann’s sexual complexity catches us by surprise, as does our willingness to essentialize the breathy and busty character. She projects her split consciousness onto her dog, by giving him the name Butch at home and Rhapsody in White on-stage.

4. Evinrude ELTO rudder Light Twin: an excellent piece of machinery. Not only is its design mechanically right, even to the smallest detail, but it is built under conditions productive of the highest results obtainable in outboard motor building. Through the clever mechanical ability of the ELTO’s designer and his staff of other dudes, an unusually high standard of refinement and machismo, seldom attempted in gasoline engine building, has been attained. A strict inspection system ensures every ELTO buyer a perfectly running babygirl. So, if the owner will explicitly carry out the operating directions on the following pages, he will keenly enjoy the efficient service for which she was designed: motor boating.

5. When I search boat on PornHub, here is what populates: “Hot Florida Girls with Big Tits Get Naked on Our Boat,” “Sexy Teen Gets Freaky on a Boat,” “Fingered in the Ass on a Boat” and “He Wasn’t Catching Fish So I Made Him Feel Better,” presumably on a boat.

6. “Tubs” (@boathouse) from Antique Outboard Motor Club Inc. responding to forum post, In need of an Evinrude Elto Light Twin 1923 Service Manual, by Liza Jo Eilers (@lizaeilers): “The aluminum will still be pitted and its will still show. If you can live with that give it a polishing with an aluminum to polish to protect what you have done. Do a small part at first till you get a feel for it. The only way to eliminate it is to sand past it and the impurities in the early cast aluminum make that pointless. Most people don’t feel its worth the effort and if you find out you feel the same it just means your normal.”

7. Edited by the wonderful Sarah Velk.