LOCATION: Outdoor exhibition, Järnvägsgatan, Landskrona
Liz Nielsen is an experimental photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Her photographs are made without a camera and can also be described as light paintings or photograms.
Nielsen builds her own ‘negatives’ by creating a complex arrangement of transparent and opaque layers. Then she enters the analog color darkroom, a pitch-black environment, where she exposes the light sensitive paper to a variety of light sources. Nielsen bypasses the camera, and works directly on top of the paper, using the paper as film. The ‘paper’ is then processed through traditional color chemicals and the image appears. Each photogram is unique and cannot be duplicated.
Nielsen states: “I’m drawn to photography as a way of capturing cognitive sight. What one sees in the world differs from what another sees in the exact same space, even when we think we are looking at the same thing. In my current work, seeing and reading the imagery is closer to what one experiences with painting than photography. Yet, at the same time, my work is a very pure form of photography. It’s recorded light which is the very definition of Photography. Prior to art, I studied philosophy and it influences my work directly in that I am endlessly curious about the meaning of life and the dimensions of existence. Working with light is connected to this in that light has the incredible power to shape space, infuse emotion into imagery, and transcend time.”
Nielsen received an MFA from the University of Illinois, 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. Liz has exhibited her work extensively including recent solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Paris. Her photograms have been featured at international art fairs such as Paris Photo, Photo London, AIPAD, New York, and Unseen Amsterdam. Nielsen has been reviewed in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Financial Times, LensCulture, Vogue UK, and FOAM magazine among others.
