Liz Nielsen
HotSpots.
October 25 – December 8, 2018
Danziger Gallery is pleased to announce our second show of work by Liz Nielsen. Focusing on two of Nielsen’s many visual tropes – Stone Stacks and Portals - the exhibition focuses on a number of variations of what could loosely be described as rock formations and triangles or flames.
The title of this show “HotSpots” refers to both a place of significant activity or possibly danger (in the current political climate what abstraction could not be interpreted this way) as well as to the ever-expanding reach and potential of the photographic medium. As with all of Nielsen’s work – each piece is a reflection of art’s power to deliver spaces of transcendence in between the figurative and the abstract.
Nielsen’s work joins and adds to the historical tradition of the photogram – one of the medium’s earliest processes – and one of increasing interest in the world of contemporary art and color photography. Simply described, a photogram is an image created without a camera by placing objects or shining light directly onto photographic paper and developing the paper. Each picture is by nature unique - a record of the moment or event created by the artist.
To make her pictures, Nielsen layers and assembles shapes of different materials through which she projects varied light sources onto photographic paper. These lights allow Nielsen to essentially paint onto the paper in broad to narrow strokes. Color fields wash or overlap, small forms appear within forms, shapes shift.
In Nielsen’s words: “The analog color darkroom is a magical place where a pitch-black environment allows only the vision of the mind’s eye. I enjoy working in this way because everything is variable. It is impossible to create the same image twice, which makes each photogram unique.
In my current work, there is a focus on achieving transcendence through abstraction. I seek out shapes and symbols, looking for mathematical connections that give order to disorder. The images that I create are compositions of these collected shapes, placed strategically in alignment with the cosmos - places for collective consciousness to emerge.”
Liz Nielsen was born in Wisconsin in 1975 and lives and works in New York City. She received a M.F.A. in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Spanish at Seattle University.
Nielsen’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, and reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Financial Times.