Liz Nielsen
Works 2017 - 2020
Liz Nielsen
Cosmic Stone Stack, 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex, Unique
Mounted to aluminium and floated in a white sprayed aluminium frame, unglazed
184.2 x 127 cm, 72 1/2 x 50 in
Cosmic Stone Stack, 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex, Unique
Mounted to aluminium and floated in a white sprayed aluminium frame, unglazed
184.2 x 127 cm, 72 1/2 x 50 in
Painting with LightLiz Nielsen’s practice comprises a collection of unique images created without a camera in the studio using handmade negatives and 'found' light sources. Through a combination of elaborate craftsmanship and mastery of skill, Nielsen crafts carefully executed and precise compositions that harness the power and intensity of light. Starting her career as a painter and remaining a colourist at heart, Nielsen places as much emphasis on the creative process as she does on the finished artefacts. The way the works are produced is of equal importance as the pieces themselves, leading to an evident performative element in the work – which Nielsen refers to as 'painting with light’. For these unique colour photograms to be created, in-depth knowledge of the physics of light and colour theory are essential elements. The works present the viewer with intriguing imagery perfectly balanced in depth of colour, texture, shape and layer, creating an aesthetic that draws associations with the mystical nature of the cosmos. Gold Circle is excited to present a showcase and in-depth Q&A with American artist Liz Nielsen, based in New York City and represented by Black Box Projects in the UK. |
Liz Nielsen
Moons Rise, 2017
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fuji Lustre, Unique
Mounted to aluminium and framed in a handmade white box frame with Perspex glaze
50.8 x 61 cm, 20 x 24 in
Moons Rise, 2017
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fuji Lustre, Unique
Mounted to aluminium and framed in a handmade white box frame with Perspex glaze
50.8 x 61 cm, 20 x 24 in
Can you tell us about yourself and how your career as an artist began? Have there been any primary influences in your work, either from the art world or beyond?When I can’t sleep, I lay in bed, staring at the air, trying to come up with an invention that could change the world, help planet earth, aid humanity. Then somehow this goes on and on as a game of inflation and deflation inside my mind - where I fill up with hope and then empty back into unsolved solutions. Again, and again. How do make a significant difference. I’m interested in philosophy and quantum physics. Planet Earth inspires me. The whole dang universe studded with infinite mysteries is a source of my desire to make a mark, even if tiny, in this string of time… anything to say that I existed and that I contributed to the whole intricate order of things. When did the fascination with photograms begin? Was there a natural progression from your earlier work into camera-less photography?
For me, playing with, studying, and recording light has caught my undivided attention. Light itself is both tangible and intangible. We can know it, but we can’t hold it. It is a lot like love. To record it by collapsing its wavelengths into particles on paper has a particular power in the act of manifestation. It is akin to the meaning of abracadabra. |
Liz Nielsen
Landscape Shapes, (Ethereal), 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex, Unique
127 x 185.4 cm, 50 x 73 in
Landscape Shapes, (Ethereal), 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex, Unique
127 x 185.4 cm, 50 x 73 in
Your works are striking, with imposing physicality. How important is the choice of size, in addition to the choice of colours or shapes?
If the work has a secret to tell the viewer, then the scale is small. Larger work can be known from afar and then share new magic when you get up close. The shapes and colours must make sense mathematically and intuitively. My hope is that some of these works actually defy scale by floating without backgrounds or with multiple horizon-lines. The lack of a camera removes the ‘point and shoot’ aspect of photography. Yet, even though abstract, your photograms carry an identifiable visual identity - arguably closer to painting than camera-based photography. Where does the inspiration for the visual theme of each piece come from and at what point in the creative process do you decide what you depict?
Inside the images, there is no ‘caught moment’ but instead a landscape in motion. The edges inside the frame often blur, appearing to be shifting as we look at them. This painterly quality depicts the subjects as if they are merely apparitions in a subliminal dream world. |
Liz Nielsen
Designer Plant, 2020 Analogue silver gelatin photogram on Ilford Matte Framed in a handmade white box frame with museum glass 61 x 50.8 cm, 24 x 20 in |
Liz Nielsen
Like Miro II, 2020 Analogue silver gelatin photogram on Ilford Matte Framed in a handmade white box frame with museum glass 50.8 x 40.6 cm, 20 x 16 in |
Alongside an inescapable depth of colour, another aspect of your work that is striking is the duality with which you approach visual representation; a piece can simultaneously present a landscape whilst staying abstract and open to interpretation, or present an identifiable geometrical shape but at the same time evoking a very spiritual sense of travelling through space. Is this duality at all linked to properties of quantum physics that you have made reference to about your work in the past?
|
Dualities in composition and imagery inside of a single work connects to quantum ideas of being two things at one time, a doubling, or an elasticity in seeing like the ‘vase/face’ phenomena. Just like in a dream, when a landscape changes to a boat, and then to a car, what the viewer ‘sees’ while looking at an image is likely to shift the next time, they look at the same image. The observer creates and completes the image themselves. |
Liz Nielsen
Mountain Jewels, 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex, Unique
Mounted to aluminium and framed in a handmade white box frame with UV Perspex glaze
249 x 122.4 cm, 98 1/8 x 48 1/4 in
Mountain Jewels, 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex, Unique
Mounted to aluminium and framed in a handmade white box frame with UV Perspex glaze
249 x 122.4 cm, 98 1/8 x 48 1/4 in
For your Arrival (2018) series, you left the studio to create work outside, in the Californian hills. Did you find this to be a different experience compared to working in the studio? Was the Californian light at all an influence in the creation of this series?
A slowing down of time is present in the works made in California. While in California, my daily commute involved driving on windy highways through the hills watching sunny pollution seep from the sky into the landscape. Experiencing this type of light holds an ethereal yet weighted quality. That light made its way into the ‘Arrival’ works as muted pastel colours and jagged mountain shapes. |
Liz Nielsen
Cool Mountain Path, 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex
Mounted to aluminium and framed in a handmade white box frame with UV Perspex glaze
105.5 x 75.9 cm, 42 1/2 x 30 in
Cool Mountain Path, 2018
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex
Mounted to aluminium and framed in a handmade white box frame with UV Perspex glaze
105.5 x 75.9 cm, 42 1/2 x 30 in
You refer to your work as ‘painting with light’, and indeed your use of light and photosensitive material is as true to that statement as possible. Do you find it liberating being able to work with the photographic medium and achieve an aesthetic result that resembles painting?
Light is an incredible medium that has the power to infuse emotion and shape time and space. It permeates and fills every corner of anything in its path when left alone. I enjoy trying to tame it, hold it, and harness it in small ways. Like a painter, I often focus on the intensity of the coloured light and how it bleeds, flows, interacts, and fades. |
Liz Nielsen
Pyramid Dimension, 2019
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex
10.2 x 12.7 cm, 4 x 5 in
Pyramid Dimension, 2019
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex
10.2 x 12.7 cm, 4 x 5 in
Colour is a dominant force in your work, with your chosen colour palette having a vivid, bold and rich quality. You tend to use predominantly prime colours and strong geometric forms in your pieces. Is this a conscious creative decision by you, and is there a link between the camera-less process and properties of your materials with that choice?
Because of the historical and also contemporary significance of prime colours and classical shapes, I feel they have a universal way of visually communicating. Triangles, for instance can represent pyramids, portals, folds in space, paths with infinite perspectives, bows of boats, and more. Plus, they can boldly balance a composition inside a rectangle. Colour-wise, take blue for example. It is calming. It is spiritual. It is royal. It can represent the sky, water, or the earth. Most people feel magnetically and perhaps unexplainably drawn to blue. Lately, I have been focused on using solid black and opaque white yet with glowing colours emanating from the edges. |
Liz Nielsen
Dancing with you, 2019
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex
25.4 x 20.3 cm, 10 x 8 in
Dancing with you, 2019
Analogue Chromogenic Photogram on Fujiflex
25.4 x 20.3 cm, 10 x 8 in
Working alone in the dark must involve carefully planned choreography. Can you describe the process and steps you follow in making these large and meticulously executed photograms?
Being in total darkness requires hard rules and planning. By guiding myself around with objects fixed inside the room or on the walls, or even temporary markers like tape that I place to ‘feel for’, I choreograph my actions. Moving layers and objects and exposing the paper to light, there is an artist dance of controlled movements. As long as I don’t spook myself out in the dark with my wild imagination, and I remain in the flow, things go smoothly. I breath slowly and count wavelengths. I become in a semi-meditative state. How do you see your work evolving going forward? Would there potentially be a more digital side to explore?
I would love to explore the digital universe for a large-scale project like a public mural. Despite my analog ways, I’ve got a photoshop wizard inside me. |
See Liz Nielsen's first Monograph entitled ‘Apparitions’.
|
Liz Nielsen 'Apparitions' Monograph
Liz Nielsen is represented by
Black Box Projects
All images ©Liz Nielsen
Courtesy of Black Box Projects
Courtesy of Black Box Projects
Bio
Nielsen's work is a contemporary application of one of the best-known avant-garde photographic processes - the photogram - which was first mastered by Man Ray and Maholy-Nagy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Each unique image is created without a camera by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light.
Nielsen started her career as a painter and is a colourist at heart. She calls her work 'painting with light' which refers to the performative nature of its creation. Nielsen replaces the traditional negative with a handmade matrix, built with multiple layers, found light sources and harnessing different wavelengths of the colour spectrum to create rich hues. Creating these pieces can take up to 12 hours per session and up to 100 exposures. The paper she uses is negative rather than positive, reversing the colours and often creating surprising new combinations. 'The final outcomes are pre-planned with strong intention and formally composed,' she explains, 'but because I'm working with light, they always have some surprises. The light bleeds and spills and doesn't want to be contained.'
Liz Nielsen was born in Wisconsin in 1975 and lives and works in New York City. She graduated with a BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University, a M.F.A. in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nielsen is part of this new generation that have returned to the essential elements of analogue photography and its processes as subject matter, reimagining the abstract and painterly potential of the medium. Her work has been exhibited extensively in New York, Chicago, Berlin, Dublin, Budapest, Paris and London.
Nielsen's work was part of the J.P. Morgan Curator's Highlights - "Pictures-In-Play" at Paris Photo Fair 2016. Her recent LA exhibition, I’d Like to Imagine You’re in a Place Like This, was one of Artforum’s cirtic’s picks of 2021. Her exhibitions have also been recently reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artslant, the Wall Street Journal and Libération, among others. Liz Nielsen has work in the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection as well as notable private collections internationally.
Nielsen started her career as a painter and is a colourist at heart. She calls her work 'painting with light' which refers to the performative nature of its creation. Nielsen replaces the traditional negative with a handmade matrix, built with multiple layers, found light sources and harnessing different wavelengths of the colour spectrum to create rich hues. Creating these pieces can take up to 12 hours per session and up to 100 exposures. The paper she uses is negative rather than positive, reversing the colours and often creating surprising new combinations. 'The final outcomes are pre-planned with strong intention and formally composed,' she explains, 'but because I'm working with light, they always have some surprises. The light bleeds and spills and doesn't want to be contained.'
Liz Nielsen was born in Wisconsin in 1975 and lives and works in New York City. She graduated with a BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University, a M.F.A. in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nielsen is part of this new generation that have returned to the essential elements of analogue photography and its processes as subject matter, reimagining the abstract and painterly potential of the medium. Her work has been exhibited extensively in New York, Chicago, Berlin, Dublin, Budapest, Paris and London.
Nielsen's work was part of the J.P. Morgan Curator's Highlights - "Pictures-In-Play" at Paris Photo Fair 2016. Her recent LA exhibition, I’d Like to Imagine You’re in a Place Like This, was one of Artforum’s cirtic’s picks of 2021. Her exhibitions have also been recently reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artslant, the Wall Street Journal and Libération, among others. Liz Nielsen has work in the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection as well as notable private collections internationally.