li pallas

Li Pallas  is a Printmaker and Installation Artist currently based in Washington, DC. Focusing on the tenderness and brilliance of conversing with strangers, she shapes environments and posters alike with interactive reflections of simple kinship. While much of her work could be summed up as expressions of love and belonging, she never fully ignores the political and capital inhibitions to these most basic human needs. She walks the line between campy sentiments and radical gestalt often by littering what is uncomfortably real in the foreground of a harmonic composition: deconstructing useless mores and obscuring them into a critical and comprehensive peace. Her graphic work includes such proffers as “the wrench in your gears loves you” and “work hard and sunbathe often”; kidding at the irony of the existential and dominant narrative and imbuing it with lucid joy. 

If she has a crush on you, she will tell you about her time spent in Providence: where “we should hang out and watch documentaries” is a euphemism for “I wanna be your best friend” and “we should collaborate on an art project” means “lets make out at 4am.” Much of coming into her form as an artist was spent their, living without central heat and eating rice and broccoli. Sometimes cheese.

In the absence of a functioning profit motive, she finds herself intensely driven to produce that which acknowledges difficulty and then makes the world more bearable. With a background in logic and a penchant for theory, she often restricts herself to certain deductive elements: minimal layers, objects, colors; making use of repetition in patterns of cascading or swarming forms. Through these austere and subtle textures she hopes to help slip you from the strongholds of the mechanistic grind into an agent of your own experience. She also enjoys tea and cake.