2012 Biennial: Liz Deschenes

My name is Liz Deschenes.
I'm a visual artist.
The pieces that I'm making
for the Whitney Museum are all photograms,
meaning they're cameraless,
so I'm just working with the most basic
elements of photography,
which is paper, light, and chemicals--
there's no negative, there's no digital file
so I'm bringing it back
to a pre-photographic status.
I develop all the work outside.
Depending on how cold it is
or how humid it is,
the paper reacts differently
in the chemicals.
The colder it is,
the slower the reaction time is.
The warmer it is,
the faster the reaction times.
Many of the photograms
that I have made in the past
past have a mirror-like surface,
which takes the idea of the mirror
in photography
and doesn't make it a metaphor
but actually makes it an object.
My work is in reaction to, I think,
the limited scope that photography
is often understood by.
I think photography is capable
of much more than
representing a particular moment in time.
The viewer actually becomes
an active participant in the work.
They're not given a representation
of something from the past;
they're given a physical object
that they can participate with
in the present tense.