“Among the eleven sculptures, “Litany” consists of 25 painted bald cypress knees, their surfaces marred by burn marks representing the 750,000-plus Americans killed by Covid; “Songs of Silence” is a fence-like installation of corkscrew willow branches, felled by a microburst, then collected by the artist and affixed with carved wooden birds, painted asphalt black. The six paintings are half-imagined landscapes festooned with microscopic contagion imagery and glimpses of environmental havoc caused by Trump’s nativist wall. All preserve Lyman’s wit, wonder, and anti-autocratic manipulation of materials, but the overall tone is funerary and unsettling.”
Steven L. Jones, artist and writer based in Chicago (copyright 2021; all rights reserved)