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WALKER ART CENTER TO PRESENT NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK BY LIZ DESCHENES

EXHIBITION IS ARTISTS FIRST SOLO PRESENTATION AT AN AMERICAN MUSEUM

MINNEAPOLIS, September 18, 2014The Walker Art Center is thrilled to present Liz Deschenes: Gallery 7, an exhibition featuring new work by the New Yorkbased artist from November 22, 2014 through November 22, 2015.

Since the early 1990s, Liz Deschenes has produced a singular and influential body of work that has done much to advance photographys material potential and critical scope. Making use of the mediums most elemental aspects, namely paper, light, and chemicals, she has recently worked without a camera to produce mirrored photograms that reflect viewers 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 sites unique features.

For this yearlong, site-specific installation, Deschenes will transform the space of the Walkers seventh-floor gallery with a photographic intervention. Eliminating the gallerys temporary architecture to reveal its east-facing windows, she will allow natural light into the space and install a series of standing rectangular panels angled in relation to the wall and each other. These large-scale abstractions, which occupy the space of the viewer more than the conventional space of the photograph, mark out distinct spaces within the gallery itself as well as create new apertures and angles for viewing the architecture and artwork.

The panels will result from the artists distinctive silver-toned photogram process as well as her new experiments in state-of-the-art three-dimensional digital pigment printing. Deschenes produces photograms by exposing sheets of photosensitive paper to the ambient light of night before fixing them with silver toner. Her process is an alchemical one that is contingent on temperature, humidity, and other environmental factorsultimately open to chance and natures intervention. The resulting surfaces of her works offer a foggy, mirrored cast, reflecting the viewers who encounter them as well as the spatial context of their display, and since her chosen materials are prone to oxidation, they develop slowly over time. More recently, Deschenes has experimented with three-dimensional digital pigment printing on translucent polycarbonate sheeting to produce large blue monochrome abstractions that are viewable in the round. With a surface not unlike the texture of ground glass, these new works absorb and refract incidental light, suggesting a photographic calibration of the gallerys space.

For this installation, the artists most ambitious to date, the temporal and spatial implications of these two photographic processesone analog, the other digitalfind a particular context within the history of the Walker Art Center and its seventh-floor gallery. The angled arrangement of Descheness panels will echo different architectural features of the Walkers 1971 Edward Larrabee Barnesdesigned building, namely its helical plan of gallery staircases that continue onto the buildings outdoor terraces. The rectangular shape and proportion of her panels are also conceived in distant reference to an unbound publication produced on the occasion of curator Lucy Lippards exhibition c. 7,500, an all-women conceptual art exhibition that the Walker presented in its seventh-floor gallery in 1973. Additionally, Deschenes has chosen to fit the space of her installation with a picture rail hanging system reminiscent of the one used in the Walkers now demolished 1940 building, further collapsing disparate spatial histories of site and display.

As in previous bodies of work, here Deschenes continues her speculative research into photography, positioning the medium as a primary experience of surface, reflection, and duration, rather than simply a means of mechanical reproduction. As such, she has conceived the yearlong exhibition itself as a test of the gallerys own light exposure capacities. Using the printing industrys Blue Wool Scale, a standard used to gauge the lightfastness of inks, as a point of departure, Descheness chamber of photographic panels will register the effect of natural light over an extended period. Here, the decisive snap of a cameras shutter is drawn out in time and space, effectively framing the conditions of the works display and suspending its historical references for our consideration. Photography, Deschenes points out, is capable of representing much more than a moment in time.

The exhibition is curated by Eric Crosby, Associate Curator, Visual Arts.

About the Artist

Recently described by the New York Times as one of the quiet giants of post-conceptual photography, Liz Deschenes has exhibited her work regularly since receiving her BFA in 1988 from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She has recently mounted exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Campoli Presti, London and Paris; Secession, Vienna; and Sutton Lane, Paris and Brussels. Her major installation Tilt/Swing (360° field of vision, version 1) (2009) is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through September 28 in the group exhibition Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions. Featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, she is most recently the recipient of the 2014 Rappaport Prize awarded by the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Her work is represented in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since 2006, she has been a member of the faculty of Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

Meet the Artist Reception

Saturday, November 22, 2 pm

Medtronic Gallery and Garden Terrace Room

Join the artist Liz Deschenes and exhibition curator Eric Crosby for refreshments and an early look at the Walkers newest show.

This event is co-hosted by mnartists.org.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Liz Deschenes: Gallery 7 is organized by the Walker Art Center.

The exhibition is made possible by generous support from Gayle and Mike Ahearn, Lisa and Pat Denzer, Linda and Larry Perlman, and Laura Taft.

The Walker Art Center is located at 1750 Hennepin Avenuewhere Hennepin meets Lyndaleone block off Highways I-94 and I-394, in Minneapolis. For public information, call 612.375.7600 or visit walkerart.org. Stay connected via your mobile device and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.