June 01, 2006
ELIZABETH LEISTER
EVERY BODY IS EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
Every Body is Everywhere and Nowhere combines performance and technology in an immersive video installation. This new project continues Elizabeth Leister's themes of transformation and control in relation to the body. Leister's performative investigation is informed by a history of body-based performance art, including, Ana Mendieta's "Silhueta Series", "Push Ups", by Vito Acconci and "Up To and Including Her Limits" by Carolee Schneemann. Like the aforementioned, Leister uses video images of body imprints and line drawings, actual and animated, to study the physical and virtual body in space.
What occurs when the body is transformed through our use of technology? The amalgamation of video, performance and drawing in Leister's project links the traditional to the technological and emphasizes the physical impact of our bodies on the world we live in with one another. Our body language, sense of touch, corporeal presence and physical movement through space become invisible as we interact via machines. What is lost? What is gained?
Leister will perform a drawing to define her own physical borders within a specific moment in time and space. This drawing will be made each day for the duration of the exhibit in Leister's Los Angeles studio and transmitted through live-feed via web-cam, into The Morris Gallery in Philadelphia. The traditionally intimate space of performance will expand as the body of the artist is projected across space and time. Made up of shifting light and pixels traveling through cyberspace, the body becomes expansive and limitless.
A second video shows a collage of the imprints left behind by Leister's family and friends: a snow angel, footprints in the sand, a sweater tossed to the ground. A third projection of an animated drawing outlines, frame by frame, a body moving through space. Like the drawing created in the performance, lines are built up to define a path of movement, then reverse and erase.
A computerized voice expresses a desire to be everywhere and nowhere, everyone and no one while a second audio track, taken from Leister's writings, is an overlay of a human voice whispering as if she were light and breath in an unnamed space.
Finally, the video projections will be installed in relation to a set of mirrors to create a kaleidoscope of images that will reflect the body of the viewer. Through live-feed performance, drawing and video the project will juxtapose the physical body and the immateriality of the virtual body.
The exhibition in the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts opens on June 10th and runs through August 20th. The installation, which will open with a free reception June 9 from 6 to 8 p.m., is curated by Alex Baker, the Academy's Curator of Contemporary Art.
Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Academy is located at 118-128 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia, two blocks north of City Hall. Regular admission is $7 adults, $6 seniors and students with ID, $5 children / youth ages 5-18, free for members and children under age 5.
Elizabeth Leister received an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art. In Philadelphia, her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Nexus Foundation for Today's Art. Her work has also been shown at the Delaware Museum of Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Art in General and P.S. 122 in New York, and the Kellogg Art Gallery at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, among others. She has received awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Leeway Foundation.
Posted by jo at June 1, 2006 11:06 AM
