source: mfaphotosvaedu

Liz Deschenes is a contemporary visual artist whose work explores the materials and properties of photography, light, and perception, often in relation to the architectural environments within which they are displayed. Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, France; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, as well as The Art Institute of Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art; and the Corcoran Museum of Art and Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Center in Washington, D.C.

She has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at Campoli Presti in Paris and London (2013); Secession, Vienna (2012); Sutton Lane, Brussels (2010); and Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York (2009). Deschenes’ work has been included numerous group exhibitions including “What is a Photograph?” curated by Carol Squiers at the International Center of Photography in New York (2014), “Cross Over: Photography of Science + Science of Photography” at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2013), and the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Her first monograph was published in 2012 in conjunction with her exhibition at Secession, Vienna.
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source: walkerartorg

Since the early 1990s, Liz Deschenes has produced a singular and influential body of work that has done much to advance photography’s material potential and critical scope. Making use of the medium’s most elemental aspects, namely paper, light, and chemicals, she has recently worked without a camera to produce mirrored photograms that reflect our movements in time and space. Her carefully calibrated installations of these pieces have probed disparate histories of image production, abstraction, and exhibition-making, while also responding to a given site’s unique features.
For this yearlong exhibition, Deschenes has produced a new body of work, reconfiguring the Walker’s seventh-floor gallery with a photographic intervention. Eliminating the room’s temporary architecture to reveal its east-facing windows, she has allowed natural light into the space and installed a series of free-standing rectangular panels. Some are the result of the artist’s distinctive silver-toned photogram process; others represent new experiments in digital pigment printing on translucent plastic.
The artist produces her photograms by exposing sheets of photosensitive paper to the ambient light of night before washing them with silver toner—a process contingent on temperature and humidity. The resulting images offer a foggy, mirrored cast, reflecting the viewers who encounter them as well as the spatial context of their display. Since these materials are prone to oxidation, Deschenes’s photograms “develop” slowly over time, changing color and sheen.
More recently, Deschenes has begun to employ digital pigment printing on acrylic to produce large blue monochromes that can be viewed in the round. Her chosen colors are derived from the printing industry’s Blue Wool Scale, a professional standard used to gauge the lightfastness of pigments ranging from textile dyes to oil paint. With a surface not unlike the texture of ground glass, these new pieces capture and refract incidental light, suggesting a photographic calibration of the gallery’s space.
The temporal and spatial implications of these two imaging processes—one alchemical and reflective, the other digital and absorptive—find a particular context within the history of the Walker Art Center and its seventh-floor gallery. Her title for the exhibition, Gallery 7, which is the former name for the current Medtronic Gallery, orients us toward the past. Architect Edward Larrabee Barnes’s original designs for the Walker’s 1971 building and curator Lucy Lippard’s 1973 group show c. 7,500, featuring work by an all-women roster of conceptual artists, were also important points of departure for Deschenes’s intervention here. Finally, the artist has chosen to fit the space of her installation with a picture-rail hanging system reminiscent of the one used in the Walker’s now demolished 1927 building, further collapsing the institution’s spatial histories of site and display.
Curator: Eric Crosby
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source: whitneyorg

For several years, Liz Deschenes has explored the technical apparatus of photography—its materials, equipment, and processes. Her resulting body of work is both critically self-reflexive and lushly beautiful, hovering between photographic images and three-dimensional art objects. The photographs featured in the 2012 Biennial are photograms made by a camera-less process in which photosensitive paper is exposed to light, recording variations in tone. This technique is often used to capture the silhouette of an object placed on the paper; to create these works, however, Deschenes exposed the paper—unobstructed—outside, documenting the ambient light itself.

The artist’s interest in the properties of photography, light, and sight can also be seen in the correlation she draws between the Whitney’s Breuer building and a large-format view camera. Typically used for architectural photography, a view camera’s tilt-shift lens enables the photographer to control the representation of perspective by altering the relationship between lens and film. Deschenes has arranged these photograms to visually connect the bellows apparatus characteristic of this type of camera with the stepped, “inverted ziggurat” facade of the Whitney’s exterior, and the device’s tilt-shift lens with the building’s angled windows. Thus aligning these two creations of modernism, she associates the sight of the camera with the view through and of the Breuer building.