Lia Halloran

Lia Halloran (born 1977) is an American painter and photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Lia Halloran received her MFA from Yale in 2001. She is represented by DCKT Contemporary in New York City where she had solo exhibitions in 2008 and 2006. She has also exhibited at Frederic Snitzer Gallery (Miami, FL), La Montagne Gallery (Boston, MA), 101 California Street Gallery, (San Francisco, CA), and Sandroni Rey Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Her work was included in a traveling group exhibition, “Space is the Place,” which was curated by Alex Baker and Tony Kamps for Independent Curators International. The exhibition has been shown at the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY), The Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, OH) as well as others across the United States.

For the Dark Skate series, which began in 2008, Halloran photographed herself while skateboarding in the dark, save a light attached to her, creating self-portraits where her movement abstracts her presence. The relatively long exposure time of each photograph, sometimes up to 7 minutes, would allow the light that was attached to the artist to illuminate the background of the image. At the moment the series includes Dark Skate Los Angeles, Dark Skate/Miami, and Dark Skate/Detroit. A forthcoming series will be set in the Bay Area.

The Only Way Out Is Through is a series of paintings made in 2009-2010 that were inspired by the Cuevas de los Cristales in Naica, Mexico. The large scale paintings, such as The Only Way Out Is Through (left) explore liminality and relationships. The Naica mine, where the crystals reach lengths of 60 feet, are inaccessible to most people as the conditions are extreme. Temperatures reach up to 120F and protective gear is required. To create these large scale paintings of the crystals Halloran worked from a variety of photographs in the media as well as from scientific drawings. In some of the smaller paintings there are figures perched on the crystals to demonstrate their scale.