Press Release: Liisa Roberts

08.24.99

International Artist-in-Residence Program

New Works: 99.3

OladŽlŽ AjiboyŽ BamgboyŽ, London, England

Liisa Roberts, New York, NY

Chris Sauter, Boerne, TX

Events

Artists' Dialogue

Thursday, September 9, 1999, 6:00-7:30 PM

Moderated by Okwui Enwezor, Artistic Director of Documenta XI

Opening Reception

Thursday, September 9, 1999, 7:00-9:00 PM

Exhibition Dates

September 10-October 17, 1999

Brown Bag Lunch

Wednesday, October 6, 1999, 12:00-1:00 PM

Join us for a tour of New Works: 99.3 and a brown bag lunch provided by Pecan Street
Deli. Please call ArtPace for additional information and to make reservations.

About the Artist

Liisa Roberts was selected for ArtPace's International Artist-in-Residence Program by
curator and cultural critic Okwui Enwezor, the Artistic Director of Documenta XI and
Adjunct Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Since the early 1990s, Liisa Roberts has produced a number of films and installations
incorporating film, which blur the line between media art and sculpture. Roberts' work
investigates what has been described as the "ethical dimension of images"?king at the
way images affect the individual's experience in society while researching the material
aspects of the image itself. Her installations have used the projected image and the screen
to create a space that is unfamiliar, resembling neither the white cube of the gallery nor
the flat screen to be viewed by a passive audience. Like the movement of a film in which
one frame follows another, the viewer's passage through one of her installations unfolds
a series of physical and conceptual experiences.

New York-based Liisa Roberts was born in Paris in 1969 and received her BFA from
the Rhode Island School of Design. Since the early 1990s, Roberts has exhibited
internationally, including group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Helsinki
Kunsthalle and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; The Museum of
Modern Art, Oxford, England; P.S.1, Long Island City, NY; Bard College Center for
Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and Bildmuseet UmeŒ, UmeŒ, Sweden.
Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
and the Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL. She participated in the 1997 Documenta
X in Germany and the 1999 Venice Biennale in Italy. Her work will be
featured in the Whitney Museum's upcoming exhibit, The American Century.

About the Installation

At ArtPace, Roberts has created a sound installation work that extends the gallery space
into the city. Roberts' process began by conducting a number of interviews with people,
recording their stories and perspectives on historical and personal monuments. These
interviews form a fragmented soundtrack, which creates a complex space built from
diverse voices and locations.

The project investigates some of the desires that are at play when we identify
strongly with an image or an event that takes place within and beyond our personal
experience. About the project, the artist comments, "Events are understood in the present
through linear narrative time, such time can be identified as ?istory'? categorization
of the past. This categorization is a consequence of the need for value and instruments.
The ways in which we link places together and transform them into personal narratives,
however, play a subversive role in undermining dominant interpretations of space. These
narratives are a means of ?isclosure' between the narrator and the place, in which the
individual's identification with the place reveals a secret while creating spaces. In the
installation, this temporality of language creates the time for physical actions in which
individuals actually realize themselves."

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