HEIKE LISS MARCH 16 - APRIL 22, 2006 CURATED BY LYN HEJINIAN
CUE ART FOUNDATION
We are honored to host this exhibition generously curated by Lyn Hejinian. Ms. Hejinian, a poet, essayist and translator, has chosen Heike Liss, an artist who divides her time between California and Germany. Ms. Hejinian's appreciation of Ms. Liss' work demonstrates how the Foundation's discretionary selection process allows for a natural cross-pollination between differing forms of expression. CUE appreciates that geographic location can sometimes limit an artists exhibition possibilities elsewhere, thus CUE is pleased to offer Ms. Liss the opportunity for her first solo ell.hibition in New York. Ms. Hejinian and we, together, wish her a future of fulfillment and success.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT I have always been interested in the way that we, as participants in a
culture, identify ourselves. Before becoming a photographer I studied Ethnology and Social Anthropology.
The camera is a means to understand the world I live in. I like to work in series over long periods of time. This allows me to dive into a context and learn about the structures of relationships among groups of people or objects and how they interrelate-visually, emotionally, socially and historically.
Over the last few years I have worked in both photography and video to explore recurring
events of day-to-day life, it's often banal rituals, and rites of passage signifying the passage of time.
Recording and re-contextualizing familiar images and incidents, I look for universal aspects of human
experience in varied socio-cultural and persot;1al situations and expressions.
home/away is a series of photographs that I have been taking of hotel rooms on journeys in
Europe. I think of these images as portraits that speak of a sense of a lack of belonging: in a place, in a
time, in the world. Since 1999, I travel back and forth behveen California and Europe. honie/away asks to
what extent do we define ourselves in relation to "home"; the work examines what that definition means in a world where so many individuals do not live where they were born. Heike Liss
CURATOR'S STATEMENT
Wherever we encounter a work of art, we know that a person is and was there before us. Heike Liss in her work takes this assumption-this obvious fact-forward and apart. History (an obsession of postwar German artists and, increasingly since "9/11," of American ones) and the lack of history, person and the absence of person, the convergence of somewhere special with nowhere in particular, the details of a world whose detail has been globalized (smudged)-these are some of the themes underlying (though never dominating) Liss' many and otherwise individually distinct works. She works in a variety of media, and she does so in ways that turn the conventions of each medium back on itself. Each work seems to ask of itself, "Who was here?" or "Who wasn't?" "Who saw this?" "Who didn't?" The English language preposition "before" is metaphysically intricate. In meaning both "prior l:o" ("That happened before you were born") and "in the presence of" ("You are standing before the
monument"), it suggests that the past and the present are coeval, parts of a single duration. Perhaps one of the functions of art is to allow us to experience this duration, to allow us to live historically. Few other contemporary a1tists seem as concerned as Liss is with creating works that let us feel time. In the series of photographs called home/away, for example, time is a vividly palpable
presence, a fourth dimension of the works, saturating the colors and redefining the objects before our eyes. It is because of this temporal fourth dimensionality that the boundaries of the objects may seem slightly vague, as if they consist of both more and less than matter, or as if something were lurking just behind them. Life requires space, of course, but even more fundamental to it is time; time is the most vital, the most lively, of the dimensions requisite for living. Heike Liss' works, in portraying time, depict life. Lyn Hejinian
ARTIST'S BIO
HEIKE LISS
Heike Liss was born in 1960 in Diisseldorf, Germany. She studied Ethnology and Social Anthropology at the University of Tiibingen. Her early experiences as a photogra pher included a three month trip to Ethiopia on the one hand, and years working in a Polaroid portrait studio on the other. During the 1990s she exhibited her photos of musicians at festivals such as Music Unlimited in Wels (Austria), Musique Actuelle in Nancy (France), and the International New Jazz Festival in Moers (Germany), as well as Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (Paris), FNAC (Marseille), and the Escuela di Arquitectura (Osorno, Chile). In 2002 Heike received her Masters of Fine Arts from Mills College, Oakland, California. She was awarded the 2001 Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowship in San Francisco and the 2002 Fellowship at 'fhe Photography Institute in New York City. Since then, her work has been shown throughout North America and Europe, in places such as Mousontunn (Frankfurt), Fluctuating Images (Stuttgart), Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Strasbourg), The Antimatter Festival (Victoria, B.C.), OneTake Filmfestival (Zagreb), New Museum School (Boston), Arts Commission Gallery (San Francisco), and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (Yerevan). Heike has collaborated with artists across many disciplines, including choreographer Fran9ois Verret, composer and musician Fred Frith, multi-media artists Michael Trigilio and Nomi Talisman, and poet Lyn Hejinian. As well as working in video, photography, and site-specific installation and public inter vention projects, she acts as a curator, most recently for the Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg and The Lab in San Francisco. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York. She divides her time between Germany and California, where she lives with her husband and children.
CURATOR'S BIO
LYN HEJIN IAN
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her most recent books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The Univer sity of California Press published a collection of her essays titled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. Since 1976 Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics Journal. She is currently the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. Other collaborative projects include a work e;1titled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996, a composition entitled Qite Tran with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian, l:\vo mixed media books (The Trar;eler and the Hill and the Hill and The Lake) created with the painter Emilie Clark, and the award-winning experimental documentary film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs. In the fall of 2000, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Depart ment at the University of California, Berkeley.
CUE ART FOUNDATION MISSION CUE Art Foundation, a non-profit organization, provides educa
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
tional programs for young artists and aspiring art professionals in New York and from around the country.
Gregory Amenoff
These programs draw on the unique community of artists, critics, and educators brought together by the
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Foundation's season of exhibitions, public lectures, and its in-gallery studio program. Gallery internships
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and stipends afford the next generation of art professionals intimate, working knowledge of the art-making
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and exhibition processes. CUE's 2000 sq. ft. gallery and offices, located in New York's Chelsea gallery
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district, serves as the base for the various educational programs conducted by CUE. The Foundation's exhibition season gives unknown or under-recognized artists profes
A DVISORY COUNCIL
sional exposure comparable to that offered by neighboring commercial galleries, without the usual
Gregory Amenoff
financial restraints. CUE does not promote a particular school of artistic practice or regional bias; we only
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require that exhibiting artists must either not"have had a solo exhibition in a commercial venue, or have
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received minimal recent public exposure.
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CUE's Advisory Council, an honorary group of artists and leading figures from the arts education, applied arts, art history, and literary communities, has the responsibility of selecting exhibition
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curators. The curators, in turn, nominate artists to exhibit at CUE, and continue to play a role throughout
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the exhibition process, helping the artists catalogue their work for exhibition. Both the Advisory Council
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and the exhibition curators actively participate in the public lectures and educational programs. GALLERY DIRECTOR
Jeremy Adams DIRECTOR OF Cover: home/away #40 (detail). 2005 C-pnnt, D1mens1ons variable CUE Art Foundation 1s supported in part by public funds from the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Counc·1 on the Arts through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Experimental Telev1s1on Center.
DEVELOPMENT
Elaine Bowen PROGRAM COORDINATOR
Beatrice Wolert-Weese
ISBN: 0-9776417-0-8
PROGRAM ASSISTANT
All artwork © He ke Liss The color pnnt1ng for this exh1b1t1on was provided in part by Light Waves Photographic. Inc, n San Francisco, Cal1forn1a.
Kara Smith
Catalog designed by Elizabeth Ellis
2 0 0 5/6
ISBN 0-9776417-0-8
9 780977 641703
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ART FOUNDATION
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