Liz Deschenes

Liz Deschenes (born 1966) is an American contemporary artist and educator. Her work is situated between sculpture and image and engages with post-conceptual photography and Minimalism. Her work examines the fluidity of the medium of photography and expands on what constitutes the viewing of a photograph. Deschenes has stated that she seeks to "enable the viewer to see the inconstancy of the conditions of display, which are always at play but sometimes hard to see." Her practice is not bound to a single technology, method, process, or subject, but to the fundamental elements of photography, such as light, paper, chemistry, and time.

She has taught at Bennington College and was a visiting artist at Columbia University's School of Visual Arts and Yale University. In 2019, she was the Wolf Chair in Photography at Cooper Union. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and is a visiting artist at Columbia University. She lives and works in New York City.

Deschenes was born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up on the South Shore, a largely homogeneous and conservative town. As a child, she frequently encountered and was fascinated by the Boston Gas Tank (Rainbow Tank) by artist and activist Corita Kent, situated prominently on the waterfront of Dorchester.

In the mid-1980s, Deschenes enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), intending to study painting or architecture but eventually changing her focus to photography. The pedagogical style of RISD at the time was very conservative and there were few female faculty members in the photography department. As a result, Deschenes sought other contexts for involvement with feminism, queer politics, AIDS activism, examining the power of representation within the medium of photography. Deschenes graduated from RISD in 1988 with a BFA degree in photography.

Deschenes worked in photography labs as a technician throughout her career as a young artist, becoming adept at chemical and analogue printing processes. In this capacity, she also worked extensively documenting the artwork of others, which influenced her notion of mediation and the conditions of production and display. In 1997, Deschenes presented Elevation #1-#7 (1997), a set of seven monochrome dye transfer prints whose colors correspond to those developed by cartographers to represent the range of earth's elevation. In the work, by utilizing the process of dye color transfer color printing, which was discontinued by Kodak in 1994, Deschenes investigates the technological changes in the medium. In 2001, influenced by her visit to the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas, Deschenes created her series Blue and Green Screens (2001-2002), which foregrounded the invisible backdrops used for special effects in film production.

Deschenes explores the materials and properties of photography, light, and perception, often in relation to the architectural environments within which they are displayed. Curator and critic Matthew Witkovsky has written that Deschenes' work "pushes against the basic terms by which photography is conventionally defined: instantaneity, veracity, fixity, or reproducibility." At the same time, Deschenes engages with the legacy of Minimalism, drawing attention to the techniques of the observer by deploying old photographic methods and techniques such as the photogram and the daguerreotype. Deschenes "calibrates her works to the site" in order to reveal the spectator's relationship to the space, whether by encouraging new visual encounters or responding to and disrupting the architectural space.

In 2007, Deschenes presented her series of photographs titled Moiré (2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery's "Registration" exhibition. For the work, Deschenes photographed a sheet of perforated paper filtering the light coming through the window, and layered the negative with a duplicate in an enlarger to create an abstract image with illusions of movement. Moirés were paired with Red Transfer (1997), a diptych of monochromatic dye transfer prints with subtle differences in hue. The dye transfers' matrices alignment served as a counterpoint to the misregistration in the Moirés series. In an interview with Mousse Magazine in 2014, Deschenes noted that the Moires series sought to "confound" the limitations of making something "with a property largely outside of the confines of photography and expectations that are brought to looking at a photographic work."

Two years later, in 2009, Deschenes created Tilt / Swing (2009), an installation of six "silver mirror" panels arranged in a 360-degree floor-to-ceiling configuration. It was based on an unrealized exhibition design conceived by Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus artist and architect, in The Fundamentals of Exhibition Design. While Bayer's schema sought to be "an inclusive picture of all [viewpoint] possibilities," Deschenes' installation resulted in a fragmentation of the surrounding environment. Commenting on the title of the work, Matthew Witkovsky has written that the words tilt and swing evoke "abstract issues of viewpoint and manipulation, for example the ways in which the spectatorial subject is turned or focused in the controlled setting of a museum building." At the same time, curator Eva Respini has remarked that in addition to the reference to Bayer, it is crucial to consider the influence of Conceptual and Performance Art in Tilt / Swing, as the work requires a physical "activation by the viewer."