“Liz Deschenes is a photographer who, in the best modernist tradition, pushes against the basic terms by which photography is conventionally defined: instantaneity, veracity, fixity, or reproducibility,” writes curator and critic Matthew Witkovsky. Indeed, Deschenes uses durational photogramatic exposure to create unique, shifting surfaces that frequently function as sculptural or architectural rather than photographic objects. Deschenes stages the technical components of photography, both contemporary and anachronistic, while reflecting, compressing, and assessing the architectural settings that surround them, through her mirrors’ simultaneous repopulation and evacuation of these spaces. 

Liz Deschenes is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, teaches at Bennington College, and is a visiting artist at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts and Yale University. In 2019 she was the Photography Department Chair at Cooper Union. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,the Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, ICA/Boston, the Pinault Collection, the Aïshti Foundation, the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, the MilwaukeeArt Museum, VAC Foundation, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She was the recipient of the 2014 Rappaport Prize. In 2019, Deschenes participated in Luogo e Segni, curated by Mouna Mekouar and Martin Bethenodat the Pinault Collection – Punta della Dogana (Venice). She also presented her work in a series of two-person exhibitions with Sol LeWitt at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2017), Miguel Abreu Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (both 2016). Her work was the subject of a 2016 survey exhibition at the ICA/Boston. In 2015, Deschenes presented solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA and the Walker Art Center, and was included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Musee d’Art Moderne,the Centre Pompidou, and Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp. In 2014, her work was featured in Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art and in What Is a Photograph? (International Center for Photography, New York). In 2013, she exhibited new work in tandem solo exhibitions at Campoli Presti (Paris and London), and group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, among others. In 2012, she was included in the Whitney Biennial and had a one-person exhibition at the Secession in Vienna and a two-person exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago that she co-curated with Florian Pumhösl and Matthew Witkovsky. Previously, her work has also been exhibited at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum, the Aspen Art Museum, Klosterfelde (Berlin), the Walker Art Center, the Langen Foundation (Düsseldorf), the Tate Liverpool, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent monographs dedicated to Deschenes’s work include Liz Deschenes (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2016) and Liz Deschenes, Secession (Vienna: Secession, Berlin: Revolver, 2012).Her work is currently on view in Material Meanings: Selection from the Constance R. Caplan Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, and will be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021.

Organized by Alan Ruiz.

This event is part of VIRTUAL BODIES, a weekly series of webinar discussions, presentations, and performances featuring artists and curators, hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. All events are free and open to the public, but require advance registration.

Contact Rafael Muñoz (munoz@newschool.edu) for information about disability access.

Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.