Artist Statement
The analog color darkroom is a magical place where a pitch-black environment allows only the vision of the mind’s eye. Without the use of a camera, I build my own negatives and paint with light. Transparent shapes are cut out with scissors and layered on top of glass. Handmade puzzles are taken apart and put together in the darkness, allowing for multiple exposures to emerge on light-sensitive paper. Light bleeds and is contained. Alongside the enlarger lamp, I use many other lights including my cell phone light to make my images. 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 am searching for anomalies: objects with superpowers or landscape hotspots with vortexes. 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, with the intention of opening channels for quantum vision, creative breakthroughs, or places for collective consciousness to emerge.
By removing time and folding space, invisible portals of energy manifest. The photographs included here reveal secret worlds where existing energy warps, echoes, transitions, and travels.
The mysterious glow inside the images is intended to powerfully fade and inflate time. Space also becomes relative and appears to move. The sense of gravity is dislocated and representational subjects shift into abstractions in front of your eyes. The landscapes are not fixed to the earth but instead are orbiting. They float transiently as mountains, water shapes, tunnels, and monuments before returning back to simple shapes and colors. Ranging from an echoing tree portal to a still life of “consciousness”, solid traces of light are left, marking the paper. The viewer is invited to embark on a magnified journey of the mind into these invented wonderlands.
Bio
Liz Nielsen is a Brooklyn based photographic artist whose works have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Paris, London, Budapest, Amsterdam and Berlin. Her photographs are printed in the analog color darkroom with handmade negatives and found light sources. Each photograph is Unique, ranging in size from 100″ x 50″ to 8″ x 8″.
Liz earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004, her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, and her BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University in 1997. Nielsen’s works have been reviewed in The New Yorker, The London Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and ArtSlant.
Liz currently works with lBack Box Projects in London, Danziger Gallery in New York, SOCO Gallery in North Carolina, Horizont Gallery in Budapest, and NextLevel Galerie in Paris.
