For three weeks beginning on December 13th Safe-T-Gallery in Dumbo will be the site of two new interactive, human-scaled light and sound installations by world renowned multimedia artist Liz Phillips. Ms. Phillips combines a sophisticated understanding of how sound shapes the space in which we live and a playful joy in how that physical space can be altered and expanded with the use of all the tools of the electronic age. “Model of Spectral Reservoir,” is an water installation with video, where live images of onlookers are transfromed and projected onto the surface of a moving stream of falling water. The second work “Ginko Afterglow” used photographs, paper speakers and the sounds of walking through leaves to effect a reformation of the audio and spatial environment around the viewer/walkers moving through the gallery. In both pieces Ms. Phillips is able to transform everyday materials and experiences into intense reflections on the nature and dimensionality of the our own physical presence.
Liz Phillips has been producing installations that alter the sound environment for more than thirty years. Writing in the academic journal PAJ (24,3) Paula Rabinowitz notes,
“Animate and inanimate objects fill spaces everywhere on our planet; they are a visible audible presence open to tactile response. Phillips’s work adds a further dimension, bringing the negative space surrounding these sites into dynamic interconnection with the solid presence of ring, table, fishtank, and so forth. As space becomes an audible environment mapping presence and absence, motion and stillness, emptiness and fullness, her work calls into question the basic philosophical divisions between subject and object, between space and time.”
Liz Phillips’ sound and multimedia installations have been exhibited at numerous art institutions and public spaces including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Lincoln Center Festival 2002, the Hudson River Museum, the Jewish Museum, Creative Time’s Anchorage, the World Financial Center, the Kitchen, the Capp Street Project, San Francisco and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She has also collaborated on interactive dance and video events with Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik, Robert Kovich and others.
Ginko Afterglow was produced with the assistance of Rii Kanzaki (paper, video), Heidi Howard (photo), Isaac Zal Sprachman (metal work), Katie Martin (printing), Andy Wagener (editing), and Jacob Wick (programming.)
Join the artist at Safe-T-Gallery on Thursday, December 13th for an opening reception from 6 to 8 PM.
© Heidi Howard