Press

Claire Huschle, Sculpture Magazine, July/August 2008.
Architecture/Sculpture
Katzen Arts Center, American University Museum
Barbara Josephs Liotta's  Terrace Descent  examined the shared vocabulary of sculpture and architecture.  Over a corner facing the stairs, Liotta used cord to suspend chucks of black marble and granite from a series of parallel metal rods.  As the rods receded into the corner, the marble and granite pieces likewise seemed to recede, resulting in and inverted "marble staircase."  Liotta's work removed all sense of functionality.  Liotta called up notions of quarries and earth movers.  But Liotta's work also exploited the architecture of the space by incorporating motion.  As the wind swept down the stairs, Terrace Descent shifted and twisted, despite its apparent weight.  The work combined the kinetic experience of sculpture with the environmental experience of the space itself.

Lavanya Ramanthan of The Washington Post calls "Ascent" a "stunning centerpiece." February 1, 2008.

Ferdinand Protzman, " Art That Rocks"
The Washington Post, April 6, 2000.
Liotta's minimalist sculptures are made from rocks she finds in riverbeds or on the seashore and then binds with cords or chains.

There is something strange, severe and dynamic about these stones in bondage.  That power derives from the tension between the materials and the use to which Liotta puts them.  The stones are inherently beautiful, shaped and smoothed since time immemorial by the forces of nature.  But those qualities take on different meanings when the stones are placed in tightly controlled context as part of an artwork.  Instead of nature as a free-flowing force, it becomes captive, forced to play a role in art.

Seeing a cluster of rocks bound with black cord and hanging in midair, suspended from a chrome chain, calls to mind all manner of images.  Up close, it looks like a riverbed, hovering above ground.  From a distance, the same piece can seem ominous, like a person dangling in the air, or utterly benign, like a weird Stone Age wind chime.

Those associations vary from one work to the next, depending on the shape, size, color and type of the stones, such as slate or granite, and the way Liotta employs them.  But all of them have a psychological presence.  Its an impressive body of work.