Rachel Harrison, Liz Larner, Rebecca Morris
planchette
Regen Projects
April 25 – May 23, 2026
Shaun Caley Regen who founded LA Gallery Regen Projects in 1989 with her late husband Stuart Regen, has a great eye for original artists – many of whom began their careers as outsiders doing idiosyncratic work. Among the many artists the gallery represents are Doug Aitken, Catherine Opie, Wolfgang Tillmans and Raymond Pettibon. Recently, Regen had the inspiration to pair three artists, Rachel Harrison, Liz Larner and Rebecca Morris for the first time in an exhibition that runs at the gallery until May 23, 2026. “I can’t think of three top artists who are my favorite artists that have these incredible original vocabularies they’ve developed,” Regen said at the press preview, “and what kind of conversation it would be if you put them in the same room.”
© Rachel Harrison, courtesy Regen Projects
What you get is a conversation about materials, influences and references, about sculpture and abstraction, and although these are three very different artists, in this exhibition, I often mistook the work of one for the other. A planchette is a sort of a precursor to the Ouija board, a wooden heart-shaped item that allows for automatic writing and communications from the spirit world. Calling the exhibition planchette speaks to the invisible connections between the works.
Harrison is a Brooklyn-based artist whose works are often sculptural and involve appropriated objects, or cultural references, or painted sculptural forms. So, for example, one sculpture, The Prepper, is a bust of a head that will make you think of Giacometti. However, there is an actual Sharpie behind one ear – which Harrison explained as part of the process of bringing the human into her work and making it her own.
© Liz Larner, courtesy Regen Projects
Liz Larner is a West Coast artist whose sculptural objects investigate abstraction, the use of color, in a variety of materials from single use plastic to petri dishes. For Planchette, she has a striking sculpture, V (planchette), which gives the exhibition its name. The sculpture is a folding S shape that looks like a coiled standing cobra or a whale’s tail. Although a sculpture, it is made out of mulberry paper and egg tempura. It looks like a drawing in space. Rebecca Morris, also Los Angeles-based, is an abstract painter. One of the surprises of the exhibition is how much her canvases are at home surrounded by Harrison and Larner’s work.
“We’re all very different, but there a lot of interconnected ideas,” Harrison said. “There’s so many connections, formally, and color, and material that are off and on, and there’s similarities.”
Regen approached the artists and a conversation ensued with a back and forth suggesting works for the exhibition. Further adjustments were made when the works were installed in the gallery.
© Rebecca Morris, courtesy Regen Projects
Morris, looking at the assembled works said, “There’s some kind of chunken, massive weight of color. And I love that idea, that solidity, and that heaviness… Often painting doesn’t get spoken about like that, the way sculpture does.”
Larner, as well as Harrison and Morris, all spoke about what a benefit it was to see and talk about their paintings and sculptures in terms of their surface qualities. It made each of them see dialogue with the other works that they never would have realized were there.
At the press preview, Harrison commented on how they were each artists who weren’t seeking to fit in. They were each willing to experiment with ideas and materials that others might consider “wackadoodle.”
“We’re in a moment,” Harrison added, “where we need humanism, we need art, we need to have a connection.” And a planchette to guide us there.
Cover image: Installation view, planchette, Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
