Inside The Birth Chart Of Liz Lee

Liz Lee’s life, both publicly and privately, seems to follow a consistent narrative arc: the adorably ethereal misfit, ahead of her time, in an ill-fitting and alien setting. Magnetic, but misunderstood by those around her, who are transfixed by something that they can’t quite figure out. She is mythologized in real-time. The most literal manifestation of this was My Life As Liz, the MTV reality show chronicling her teenage years, which made her strangeness a spectacle. An Aries with a Leo Rising, it’s no surprise she fits the Main Character blueprint.

We all know that reality television has a reputation for corroding the souls of those it consumes. While fame pedostolizes people, it also objectifies them. Subjects them to unwarranted opinions, thrusts them into the open forum of online commentary, until they morph into a more curated, agreeable, cookie-cutter version of themselves. But against all odds, Liz has emerged intact. She still retains an otherworldly mystique, as well as a refreshing yet warm humility. If anything, her strangeness became a shield. A form of psychic armor.

And this is exactly where Liz Lee’s art seems to excavate the human passage of time and work backwards.

These days, Liz flirts with a different kind of danger, from the privacy of a studio in Boyle Heights. She is shaping, extraterrestrial objects through methods that are anything but gentle. The process sounds harrowing. She works with a 300-pound machine, cutting and bending aluminum and sheet metal. When she lists the tools she uses, they sound less like artistic utensils and more like weapons: mechanical shear, rivet gun, slip roller, hand brake. She leaves the studio with black residue on her hands and once sliced through her UGGs with a rogue piece of sheet metal.

This penchant for playing with dangerous tools makes more sense when you look at her chart. Her Moon is widely conjunct Mars in Gemini, a placement that demands movement, agility, and a physical outlet for emotional energy. It’s a restless signature, often driven by curiosity and capable of shapeshifting between softness and sharpness.

With both her Moon and Mars located in the part of the sky that governs public image and career, her emotional world doesn’t feel private. This is where she encounters themes of projection, performance and public perception. Her instinct is to do something about these feelings, not just feel them. To churn them into something tangible.

In her upcoming show, “Idle Halo”, at Peluche, she presents one piece that takes the form of a metal book diary, referencing her recent use of the OF platform as an online journal. Weaponizing allure and teasing us into rich emotional territory. Offering a clever, subversive commentary on intimacy and spectatorship. She shows us that vulnerability has been commodified, crafting tender, incisive works that ask what it means to be seen, and to survive it.

Liz’s current work echoes the same surreal frequency as her upbringing, but now armed with the psychic armor she once needed. Futuristic, metaphysical objects that feel like protective talismans from another dimension. They appear sharp and in stark contrast to everything else, but with her signature otherworldly allure.

As if they are teasing at what they can actually do.

Maybe they have access to another realm.

Maybe they’re from the realm Liz is from.

We took a look at her birth chart to try locate where that is.

Stars Align: Your work is delicate in concept but violent in process. What draws you to these mediums in particular?

Liz: I like the tension created when I take a material associated with industry, masculinity, weaponry and apply it to a soft, delicate feminine form, like a bow billowing in the wind.

Stars Align: Do you ever feel like your body is in conversation with the materials you use?

Liz: Totally. Sometimes the material fights back and tells me what it wants to do and at times that’s at odds with my desires but I just have to listen. It’s a collaboration with the material.

Stars Align: Your Moon/Mars placement suggests a kind of melding of masculine and feminine energy, which I feel like is so prevalent in the creative process of your work. Does gender play a role in how you work? What about the space between the intuitive/physical?

Liz: I think gender is always looming over me. I can’t escape it really. So I play with it. I invite it to dance with me.

When it comes to the intuitive and the physical I think about intuitive decision making when I’m in the process of making. I think I learned how to do that when I went to school in Paris. At calarts I felt like I had to justify every decision I made and it was very inhibiting. When I went to Paris I learned I could make intuitive decisions and learn from the work after the fact.

Stars Align: Your Sun is in the sector of the sky that rules intimacy, intensity, sex, attachment and transformation. How do you feel like these themes imbue themselves into your work?

Liz: My work thinks a lot about the gaze, the commodification of self, and the performance of femininity. Sex is ever present in being woman. These themes are intense, in that they engage with violence of objectification (which can of course lead to physical violence). And intimacy is alluded to by its stark absence. My video work in the show is found footage from a sex doll factory, with VO of a lot of texts relating to all 3 of these themes by theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, Roland Barthes and poets like Eileen Myles.

Stars Align: Has your approach to attachment transformed over time?

Liz: I think I used to believe everything my brain tells me about my specific attachments to individuals, and now I have created a little space between that inner monologue and my actions.

Stars Align: What was the last obsession you had?

Liz: Catholicism

Stars Align: A lot of people with their Sun in the 8th house go through many iterations of self, as if they fit 8 lifetimes into one. What is your current iteration?

Liz: Current iteration is hopeless romantic art freak

Stars Align: I find that a lot of 8th House Suns are very sexy without even meaning to be. I see this in you and your work, too. This might sound weird, but how do you cope with that accidental but intrinsic sex appeal? Do you view your objects as sexy? What does intentional sexuality look like?

Liz: Accidental sex appeal is so real and can totally be a curse. Especially when trying to maintain friendships with men. I have to set strong boundaries, which does not come natural to me. I’m still learning how to deal with that. Of course I view objects as sexy, I’m an artist! Intentional sexuality is so unsexy to me bc performing an idea of something isn’t sexy to me. Being earnest is sexy.

Stars Align: Your Jupiter is in the 12th House of psychic awareness. This signifies a great deal of spiritual protection. What role does spirituality/god/faith play in your life?

Liz: I got my first communion in the Catholic Church this year. God has really given me the strength to get through some serious trials and tribulations and brought me so much solace through so much instability. I wouldn’t consider myself religious but I would consider myself spiritual?

Stars Align: Have you had any prophetic dreams/psychic experiences?

Liz: Yes girl! I get it from my grandmother. She is a very powerful woman.

Stars Align: What spiritual practices are helping you at the moment?

Liz: My aux cable broke in my truck so I started talking to god when I’m driving.

Stars Align: Last insane risk you took?

Liz: Falling in love

Stars Align: With your Moon in Gemini, keeping a diary is very on brand for you. What kind of things do you disclose in your OF diary?

Liz: Mostly my follies in love

Stars Align: Is it a commentary, an outlet for you, or a spectacle for others? Or is it all three?

Liz: It started as an outlet for the stuff my friends were tired of hearing me talk about, but I still needed to process.

Stars Align: What would you hope your sculptural pieces may provide to someone who owns one?

Liz: I hope that maybe in all their beauty and contraction, sharpness and shine, that people see and experience the messy complexities of being human and it gives them permission to be sincerely themselves.

Stars Align: If your work had a superpower, what would it be?

Liz: To transmit your experience into someone else’s body so we could practice deeper empathy.

Stars Align: How do you deal with heartbreak?

Liz: Poorly. Next question. Jk. I rely heavily on the support of people in my community. I journal. I pray. I am gentle with myself and I stay busy.

Stars Align: Is there anything unusual you collect?

Liz: I’m a sentimentalist, so everything.

Stars Align: How do you deal with fears about public perception?

Liz: It’s hard. You would think being publicly humiliated on my show would have hardened me or something but I still struggle with the desire to be liked. I have to accept not everyone is gonna like me. I’m not for everyone. No one is. I have to trust that if I am sincerely myself, the right ones will appreciate me for who I am.

Stars Align: Favorite film/album/piece of media?

Liz: Ive always loved “wild at heart” by lynch (before his death)

Stars Align: What do you think your teenage self would think of your work now?

Liz: I think she would be so proud of me for learning to express myself with courage and abandon.

Stars Align: How do you feel about Los Angeles in its current state?

Liz: Some weekends I feel like it’s cooked, some weekends it feels like the the capitol of the world. It depends on whether you’re throwing a party or not.

Stars Align: How do you find love in los angeles?

Liz: You have to go out low key. I think meeting people out irl is the way. Go to art openings. Go to your friends birthday parties. Go to screenings.

Stars Align: Your Venus is in Taurus in the sector of foreign lands, philosophy and spiritual learning. Venus in Taurus is very aesthetically focused, but this placement alludes to really needing to fall in love with someones vantage point/perception/mind as well. What are you attracted to?

Liz: They need a rich inner world. They need to be principled, passionate, creative. They don’t have to be fashionable but they must be stylish. They need to be patient and gentle. And they must, and I cannot stress this enough, be a pervert.

Stars Align: Pluto in the 3rd house. Do people confess things to you frequently? Do you find that other people find it easy to be vulnerable with you quite quickly?

Liz: My old boss, Cali said it was my super power actually: my ability to meet people where they’re at, without judgement.

Stars Align: Your Venus is square Jupiter. How do you cope with the desire for more of someone/something? How are you trying to find more discipline in your life?

Liz: Wow I’m such a “more” girl! That’s dead on! “Enough” is a foreign concept I’m learning to wrap my brain around. I think gratitude is the key. To everything actually.

Stars Align: Do you feel like your previous partners fit a certain archetype?

Liz: For a while it was skaters but I’ve graduated to artists since then.

Stars Align: Favorite places in LA?

Liz: The grove, family arcade, Marcelino’s, scout

Stars Align: Favorite physical sensation?

Liz: Little spoon

Stars Align: Best date youve ever been on.

Liz: My first date with Pedro was spectacular. Sunset stroll to the beach, bookstore, Dudley

Stars Align: Worst date

Liz: I went on a date with this guy who didn’t ask me a single thing about myself once in the entire date. And then when I confronted him about it, he got really mad and he threw a fit in the ice cream shop.

Stars Align: What projects are you working on now?

Liz: Now that I finished my first solo show, I’m focusing on my ongoing OF project, experimenting within my studio practice, and my Twitch stream

Stars Align: Where can we find you?

Liz: At my upcoming show opens on July 31st at 3527 W Pico, from 7-10pm. My instagram is here!

And my website is lizlee.art