AUGUST 5 – SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

SOCO Gallery is thrilled to present an exhibition of new works by artist Liz Nielsen. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery. Liz Nielsen’s unique, vibrantly colored photograms have consistently taken photography in new and unexpected directions. She builds her own negatives and uses transparent color gels, 3d-objects, and filters to create complex and layered compositions. When she makes the work, her studio darkroom becomes a stage for an unseen performance; she skillfully shines light through blocks of color and whizzes flash bulbs past the light-sensitive photo paper. 

For the exhibition Triangle Moon, Nielsen has produced new large scale “light paintings”, saturated in rich, liquid color. These abstracted shapes from landforms are recontextualized and made into new landscapes that exist in their own space and in their own dimension. The artist is fascinated by traditional Japanese landscape photographs, Hiroshi Sugimoto in particular, where the sky and the ground are given equal importance and weight. In Nielsen’s artwork, the focus is on the space in between these two parts. She asks us: “Is the horizon line part of the top or the bottom? Or is it part of both or neither? Is it even there at all?"

The landscapes themselves are non-locatable. They are combinations of two or more locations fused together in one time, as spaces, existing inter-dimensionally in the present. Additionally, the images themselves are created to lead us to experience the work from a mutable point of view. The landscapes are compositionally sound from several directions giving the viewer a perspective outside of a traditional gravity. The work can be viewed upside down and/or rightside up. Nielsen’s quantum vision continues into the creation of the photographs. Her works are made by collapsing light waves into particles on paper, and the results present landscapes that are both somewhere and nowhere.

Nielsen has worked with film, video, painting and sculpture. She was 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. She is interested in time and how it is captured and recorded in a photograph. Nielsen also studied philosophy which today influences her work indirectly. She is endlessly curious about the meaning of life and the dimensions of existence. Working with light is connected to this. Light is a medium that has incredible power to shape space and to infuse emotion, as well as (for her) transcend time.

“Double horizon lines, aerial views, mountains filling one’s entire vision, no stepping back, space flattening, folded water, underwater lakes, caves, disorientation, filtered vision, slivers splintering off of the moon, warmed ice breaking away, the world melting into blurred light, a hundred flowers overlapping and becoming trees, spray painted stars, glass rivers, candy sprinkled lakes, steep cliffs, glowing edges, through one space into another, windows in time, orbiting objects, mysterious energy, motion blurs, the power of suggestion, gesture, everything is subject, no particular focus.” (Liz Nielsen, 2020)

LIZ NIELSEN (Brooklyn, NY, B. 1975)

Liz Nielsen (b. 1975, American) is an experimental photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her photographs are most often made without a camera and can also be described as light paintings. She works in the analog color darkroom exposing light sensitive paper and processing it through traditional photographic chemicals. Each image is unique and ranges in size from 100" x 100" to 4" x 5". 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, 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. Nielsen was an artist-in-resident at the McColl Center for Art in Charlotte, North Carolina this spring.