VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
JUN 7 – JUL 7, 2024
Elizabeth Leister
I did not describe the mirror - I was the mirror
I did not describe the mirror - I was the mirror includes digital prints by new media artist Elizabeth Leister. The exhibition, whose title is attributed to writer Clarice Lispector, features a series of images created using 3D scanning technologies. As a series of self-portraits, the work explores notions of flaws, detritus, and glitch from a feminist perspective using technological irregularities and artifacts.
“… Learning new digital workflows and adapting those into analogue processes informs my investigation into physical/digital bodies, gesture and memory within our tech driven world …”
— Elizabeth Leister
Elizabeth Leister is a digital media artist whose expansive practice includes video, performance, drawing and virtual & augmented reality. Her projects act as meditations on the unreliability of memory and the passing of time conceptualized through a feminist perspective on the body in motion, poetics and transformations in the natural landscape. Her videos and installations have been presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Torrance Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art Bologna, Italy; The Drawing Center, Art in General, Apex Art and P.S. 122 in New York; Counterpath in Denver and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. She has performed at homeLA, LACE, and Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, the Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries in Wales, the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at University of Reno, and Outpost Artists Resources in New York. Leister’s XR projects have been presented in Luminex 2.0, Mana Body + Camera Festival, XR for Change/Games for Change and the CURRENTS New Media Festival, among other venues. Her video, Silent Gardens, was commissioned for Public Art CA at the California Natural Resources Agency, in Sacramento, California. She is a 2015 recipient of a COLA Fellowship, awarded by the Department of Cultural Affairs in LA.
Artist’s Statement
Mirrors, a series of self-portraits created using 3d scanning technologies, is an attempt to capture a 3d image of my body. Retaining the flaws, detritus of the process, the images embrace the glitches that technology produces. Fragments and irregularities become a metaphor for the body, in a state of continual transformation.
My expansive practice includes video, drawing, performance and most recently, XR production, specifically virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR). Learning new digital workflows and adapting those into analogue processes informs my investigation into physical/digital bodies, gesture and memory within our tech driven world. The body in states of motion, from a choreographed dance to pedestrian actions, and mark-making with its inherently dusty tactile quality are constants across my work. Violence against women and climate change are recurring subjects, conceptualized through a feminist perspective on the female body, loss, language and landscape.