Liisa Nelson, "Dreams"
The Clay Studio
1425 N American St.
Philadelphia
Seen March 12, 2025
Showing from January 15 - March 30, 2025
I have no dream car, but I’ve found my fantasy vanity plate.
I discovered the vehicle tag for sale while visiting The Clay Studio, and hallucinated how I'd drive with it attached to my back.
The license plate is all letters, no numbers. Six characters spelling “SPECIAL” in metallic uppercase. A gold glob of a star on top, alluding to my snowflake state of being. Nobody can touch me in my model vehicle.
Forget Georgia peaches or Hawaiian rainbows. My plate is the color of the universe, splashed with shades of galaxy indigo. I have worldwide registration and every street belongs to my wheels alone.
Since Pennsylvania became the first state to issue custom plates in 1931, the rest of you have been driving around with aluminum IDs. Mine is ceramic. It’s forged from raw earth and kilned into expensive fragility.
You applied to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for your personalized plate? You paid out $80? Well I sourced mine from an art gallery in Fishtown, Philadelphia. I gave a local sculptor $300 before strapping her art to my bumper.
Then I reversed hard into your poorly parked piece of shit and saw my vision shatter into a thousand pieces. It was like demented fireworks fizzling into my nightmare sky.
The millennial dream is dead. None of us are special. We buy and we break.
But it’s still alive in Liisa Nelson’s latest exhibit, “Dreams,” at the Clay Studio. The show transforms the mundane medium of clay into rocket ships, birds, wings, unicorns and ghosts, contrasting the constraints of our material worlds with the heavens of our imagination. The objects all hang on a blue wall painted white with overcast.
Nelson’s artwork is coated in the lacquer of hipster idealism and balanced by whimsical self-awareness. I forgot to mention an important detail about my beloved vanity plate: The word "Special" is slashed in half by a knife mark, just like a targeted tire. Nelson knows how to couch the overconfidence of a unicorn aesthetic.
All together, the varied pieces suggest that we can stay grounded even while operating on alternative planes of existence. We just have to keep a good grip on the steering wheel.
