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Email PageHeike Liss 2006
March 16, 2006- April 22, 2006
Heike Liss
CUE Art Foundation
511 W 25th St Heike Liss home/away #6 (2002) |
Artist's Statement
I have always been interested in the way that we, as participants in a culture, identify ourselves. Before becoming a photographer I studied Ethnology and Social Anthropology. The camera is a means to understand the world I live in. I like to work in series over long periods of time. This allows me to dive into a context and learn about the structures of relationships among groups of people or objects and how they interrelate- visually, emotionally, socially and historically.
Over the last few years I have worked in both photography and video to explore recurring events of day- to-day life, it's often banal rituals, and rites of passage signifying the passage of time. Recording and re-contextualizing familiar images and incidents, I look for universal aspects of human experience in varied socio-cultural and personal situations and expressions.
Curator's Statement by Lyn Hejinian
Wherever we encounter a work of art, we know that a person is and was there before us. Heike Liss in her work takes this assumption-this obvious fact-forward and apart. History (an obsession of postwar German artists and, increasingly since "9/11," of American ones) and the lack of history, person and the absence of person, the convergence of somewhere special with nowhere in particular, the details of a world whose detail has been globalized (smudged)-these are some of the themes underlying (though never dominating) Liss' many and otherwise individually distinct works. She works in a variety of media, and she does so in ways that turn the conventions of each medium back on itself. Each work seems to ask of itself, "Who was here?" or "Who wasn't?" "Who saw this?" "Who didn't?"
The English language preposition "before" is metaphysically intricate. In meaning both "prior to" ("That happened before you were born") and "in the presence of" ("You are standing before the monument"), it suggests that the past and the present are coeval, parts of a single duration. Perhaps one of the functions of art is to allow us to experience this duration, to allow us to live historically. Few other contemporary artists seem as concerned as Liss is with creating works that let us feel time.
In the series of photographs called home/away, for example, time is a vividly palpable presence, a fourth dimension of the works, saturating the colors and redefining the objects before our eyes. It is because of this temporal fourth dimensionality that the boundaries of the objects may seem slightly vague, as if they consist of both more and less than matter, or as if something were lurking just behind them.
Life requires space, of course, but even more fundamental to it is time; time is the most vital, the most lively, of the dimensions requisite for living. Heike Liss' works, in portraying time, depict life.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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