windshields, car, 5 channel video projections, sound, 2022

FotoFocus and Weston Art Gallery present Liz Roberts: Post Blonde at CampSITE Sculpture Park. This new site-specific commission presents an uninhabited drive-in tableau in which one automobile is left and others are repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. Nostalgic and thirsty for typical road movie tropes, the installation references the resurgence of drive-ins and the pining for collective voyeurism of movie screenings.

The projections of a winding Cincinnati road within the vehicle’s windows move slowly, almost at the pace of walking. The video on the screen alludes to the notion of an afterlife, with moving images lingering in a used car lot on Beechmont Avenue and the U-Pull-&-Pay yard. Interspersed are the final shots from American road movies, using the ends of central texts from the genre to signal a decline of empire.

The individual car is a proxy for isolation. This interplay between the one and the many is represented by images of cars in groupings captured by Roberts, coupled with excerpts from Almost Famous (2000), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Mad Max Fury Road (2015), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Paris, Texas (1984), Thelma and Louise (1991), True Romance (1993), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), and Wild at Heart (1990). The dialogue of images from each film speculate that we are in the last gasps, while also on the precipice, of something transformative. But what comes after—what is ‘post’ transformation? What is on the other side of the collapse of capitalism, cataclysmic climate change, institutionally perpetuated systems of exploitation, and how can this transformation be recorded?

video, sound, 23 minutes, 2021

feature length version currently in production

Midwaste addresses the Midwest region, midlife, and various notions of wasted. Liz Roberts’ connection to drug subculture is inextricable from her relationship to the camera. She started making Super 8 films as a teen, shooting friends she became intimate with in circles of drug use. Her methods are palpable and relational; retracing her steps, interviewing friends about their memories of the past, and revisiting footage taken at various stages of her youth.

Films, in general, should be made by people who have lived experience of the subject. This is neither proscription nor description. It is simply preference. In an era when “opioid epidemic” has come to sound like a brand, it’s critical that we see work by cultural producers who see through the sham arc of fall-and-redemption that preoccupies audiences. Intertitles punctuate the film like the whispered asides of a smart friend “I wasn’t bad then. I’m not good now.” It’s remarkable how much power falls behind that statement when, as in this case, the maker's lived experience provides ballast. -Emily Vey Duke

Liz Roberts and Elena Harvey Collins, 2019

The Growlery, San Francisco, CA

In Courses of Action 1-5 we respond to a series of diagrams pulled from a book written by a retired Navy SEAL which we annotated as letterpress prints in 2016. The book, based in white survivalist culture, suggests that survival in an extreme situation is simply a matter of individual skill and training. It is an expression of the personal responsibility ethos taken to the level of a sickness, a view of the world in which we are all "operatives". Still, this kind of ruthless competence is seductive. Impromptu construction of body armor out of used books and duct tape, gas masks using gallon milk jugs, blending in and disappearing, defending the nuclear family home, and disposing of a body are all strategies that an “operative” can execute. We translate these static diagrams into a series of short filmed performances and interventions, recreating the scenarios using materials found at home. These performances pull the diagrams into context, into real spaces in the world. The absurdist process of acting them out opens into something different - work about the nature of collaboration, performance of care, and trespassing together.

The videos are accompanied by a risograph printed zine of the diagrams.

Liz Roberts, 2019

Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College

Recorded at Fresno City College and at CMAC (Community Media Access Collaborative) in downtown Fresno, GOING PUBLIC is a DIY public access TV show, made with the participation of FCC students and members of the Fresno artist community. Episode One: PILOT includes music and an interview with local punk band Squid Ink, and student generated content in the form of art tutorials and skits.

Episodic and accumulative, GOING PUBLIC builds over time as content is added, re edited, and looped. Thinking about issues of access, representation, local public conversations, and documentary, through the lens of a community college gallery.

Episode One: PILOT screened at 6pm on October 10 at the Art Space Gallery, with simultaneous broadcast through Community Media Access Collaborative (Comcast Xfinity Channel 93 and AT&T U-Verse Channel 99 in the Fresno area). Episode Two screened on November 7th.

Liz Roberts and Henry Ross, 2017

“On Saturday, September 9, Liz Roberts and Henry Ross performed Death Knell on the parking lot outside of Transformer Station. The performance included a car, equipped with 70 contact microphones that fed into an audio mixer, and a range of simple mechanical tools such as a rotary saw, a hammer, and a crowbar. Over the course of two hours, the artists gradually disassembled the car. The destructive act of disassembling concurrently generated a wide array of tones; a musical creation of astonishing complexity and subtlety. Mirroring the car’s carefully orchestrated dissection, the sounds slowly faded away with each shattered window, unhinged door, and more and more of the contact microphones being cut off.

Cars are collectively perceived as expensive but omnipresent consumer goods and status symbols. The performance by Roberts and Ross foregrounded a very different, less obvious but similarly fundamental narrative that is inherently tied to a car’s material manifestation and subsequent deterioration: its close connection to the rise of industrialism and, in turn, its relation to organized labor. Through their performance, the artist duo repurposed a car that had reached the end of its lifespan and turned it into a sounding body. From an ontological perspective, they also reversed the car’s symbolical meaning as a metaphor for the achievements of industrialism, turning it into an allegory of decay and society’s blind spot for the precarious state of the current economic system. The resulting sound piece incorporates that very allegorical dimension by documenting the event and its complex intertwine of process and meaning.”
- Reto Thüring, Curator of Contemporary Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art

performance documentation photos by Jillian Baughman
recording distributed by Unifactor
https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/death-knell-2

Liz Roberts, Elena Harvey Collins, 2016

An exploded diagram of a film is a good analog for this installation. The process of filmmaking—including research, screenplay writing, location scouting, set production, composing a shot—becomes invisible in the final production. In Soft Regards, the peripheral activities that go into the production of filmic space, place, and time are abstracted and extended; the play of real and unreal is centered.

Set in California’s Central Valley—an already surreal, indeterminate landscape, where parched farmland abuts new calico housing developments—Soft Regards pulls from contemporary self-help sources like survivalist instruction manuals, urban planning reports, and yoga breathing tutorials. At the heart of the exhibition is a reading room where these texts, in addition to critical theory and novels, are arranged in sequence. One book connects to the next in a corrective claiming of the practice of survivalism. In the lower gallery, the screenplay, usually a working document adhering to a strict format, is presented in skeleton form as a series of letterpress prints. 

Outside the reading room, a multi-channel video installation, Protection, made while driving the periphery of walled and fenced neighborhoods in Fresno, CA, continuously circles, combining an extended take on a location scout, dolly or tracking shot.  Video work No. 008: Use Improvised Body Armor, is both an earnest attempt to recreate an instructional diagram from 100 Deadly Skills, and a camera blocking exercise wherein the shot is rehearsed. How to Make Stones Weep, a sound installation referencing a film set and the staged landscaping of housing tracts, fills the street level gallery.

The climax of a film also doubles as a crisis; the plot of Soft Regards reaches its climax during  the 2016 election. Addressing the election directly are 4 posters made during the month of November that quote our theoretical mothers. Together they form a sentence that can be read as a set of instructions, to be expanded and built upon: Mother and destroy, refuse to normalize, stay with the trouble, and go off screen.

I’ve Been Working on Myself Since Then, 2018, surgical tubing resistance bands, coax cable, zip ties, OPTP Resistance Band Wall Anchors by Bob and Brad: Space Saving Wall Mount Clips for Home Gym Workouts, Y2K bag, dimensions variable

Midwaste (excerpt), 2018, HD video, color, sound, 04:52

Circumambulation (group show)

Ada Pinkston, Danielle Rosen, Liz Roberts, Santina Amato

Curated by Ann Meisinger and Nathan Florsheim

December 7th - 25th, 2018

To circumambulate is to complete a circuit all the way around an object. In many devotional practices, the object circumambulated is an idol or otherwise sacred item. The lap or laps can represent the passage of time, a spiritual journey or a funerary or other ritual procession. In the same breath, this walk is a revolution with no beginning and no end and a linear evolution of an event. Each of the artists in Circumambulation investigates an aspect of time whether it is the collapsing of distant timelines into one moment through video, the fabrication of an object made from a daily performative interaction or a reach back into the past from the present.

The works in this show don’t just present a transformation as a frozen, crystallized moment in time but they interrogate the process of metamorphosis and that moment’s structure, functioning as performative documents. These artists connect viewers with the past, present, and future, inviting a consideration of how the passage of time shapes and reshapes all things.

Liz Roberts, Elena Harvey Collins, 2015

Downward Dishwasher is comedic critique of personal wellness as a consumer good. The messaging of white yoga and particularly the slogans in the Lululemon manifesto - decontextualized pop-psychology snippets like “your outlook on life is a direct reflection on how much you like yourself” or “do one thing a day that scares you” - are reductive and point to a wider issue: the way that neoliberal capitalism creates an unattached individual who alone is responsible for their health, happiness, and success. If you fail, it’s all on you: you didn’t work hard enough/weren’t good enough. Downward Dishwasher pushes back against the callousness of that idea, as well as lampoons the way that women are still expected to maintain perfect bodies and homes. The video intends to bring complexity to the identity of the woman who attends a white yoga class. She’s white and suburban, but it’s never that simple. The installation is certainly a critique of that, but the intent is to criticize the culture without demonizing her.

Liz Roberts, 2016

turfgrass sod, paint, 2 channel video, 12ft x 6ft

Failed utopian instructions from the human potential movement and a turfgrass sod screen upon which sensory awakening exercises are projected/performed.  The players in the video are members of the artist-run space and collective, MINT. This space operated in somewhat of a disaster utopia zone, which inspired the original impulse to install a fresh lawn inside of a former meat-packaging facility. The community formed by banding together around an ideal and a space can simultaneously heal and harm, much like the Esalen Institute, the source of the instructional text for these group exercises.

Esalen's experiential and experimental freewheeling early days in the 1960s - with lecturers like Ken Kesey, Alan Watts, Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, and Joseph Campbell - laid the groundwork for neoliberal personal optimization in a bizarre backfire. The encouragement to turn inward and retreat from the world negated political action and social engagement. Lawncare approaches and circles this cautionary tale, looking for a different way out.

MINT Collective, 2017

SPRING/BREAK BKLYN IMMERSIVE, Brooklyn, NY, May 2017

WILL PLAY FOR SPACE: MEATBALL originated from a proposed basketball tournament in which local artist-run spaces would participate: our gallery, a former meat processing facility, transformed into a nearly full size court, Columbus’ art community as players and spectators in a communal performance. MINT Collective has since vacated our former facilities, alleviating undue financial burden and mitigating friction between our physical operation and city administration. Without a home court, WILL PLAY FOR SPACE is recontextualized into a broader conversation about displacement and nomadic participation, sustainability, and alternatives to alternatives.

Skylab Gallery, Columbus, OH, June 2017

What are the necessary conditions for competition? For sportsmanship?
What happens when there are too many players but not enough resources?
How many hoops must we jump through?
When monitoring the occupying players, when is security guised as surveillance? Secure for whom?
Who cheers for the away team? The underdog?
Without a home court, can one still play? Can one win?
In WILL PLAY FOR SPACE, the gallery is a site for away scrimmages and sketches. MINT invites viewers to play pickup games of HORSE where the activities of each competition are recorded, producing a reflexive, cumulative drawing, a play-by-play for an art gallery reception. With each layup, slam dunk, and foul, the players’ bodies are monitored, tracked, and organized through mark making and livestream video. A short zine accompanies the exhibition, including questions concerning sustainability and future of artist-run spaces, emerging artists, and the Columbus arts community at large.

MINT is a collaborative, multidisciplinary collective founded and operated by artists located in Columbus, Ohio. Abidingly fresh, adaptable, and dynamic, our mission at MINT is to support underrepresented and developing artists, to cultivate relationships within the community, to embrace alternative projects, and to remain persistently disobedient to traditional thinking.

Brooklyn photos by Samuel Morgan Photography and Christos 

Columbus photos courtesy of Skylab Gallery

Liz Roberts, Elena Harvey Collins, 2016

5-channel video projection, 03:08

Right down on the beach flats in south Santa Cruz county there is a 12 foot high, privately owned sea wall that stretches maybe a quarter of a mile. Million dollar houses sit behind it. The wall is just one of several layers of security that include a gate and a private security patrol; private property laws exerted in the tsunami zone. The wall is constructed from curved concrete, which arcs towards the water, engineered to both repel and mimic a wave. The fortress-like blankness of the wall and the shuttered houses behind it is broken by the charcoal graffiti scrawled upon it by people who make fires on the beach. A collaboration between the two artists, the video was shot by Harvey Collins, who recently moved to the area, and edited blind by Roberts, processing the landscape out of context. Place-specific narrative breaks down as the scene passes through multiple mediations, the piece evolving as a conversation between the two artists. A visual transference occurs, commuting the distance between the West Coast and the familiar landscape of wealthy suburban anywhere, engaging broader questions of self-isolation, cultural and aesthetic sameness, and public space.

Liz Roberts, Bobby Luck, 2016

Mouthfeels was made to participate in an all-women exhibition called Dare To Be Heard. Do all-women shows help change gender inequality or perpetuate it? Grappling with that question, my mind seized on another question, “how does it feel to be a woman eating a sandwich?” This absurd question was posed by Jehnny Beth of the band Savages, in response to the repeated inquiry of what it’s like to be a woman in music. Woman musician, woman filmmaker, woman artist—language is powerful, and words can perpetuate sexism, gender essentialism, and cisnormativity. I asked Bobby Luck—artist and frequent collaborator—to answer the question, and he does so while eating a sandwich from beginning to end. Later Bobby mentioned, “my dad used to call me ‘mouth’ as an insult when I stood up for myself,” reminding me of the lifelong struggle to dare to be heard.

Liz Roberts, 2015

Made from salvaged automobile windshields and retrofitted hardware in the garage at MINT — a former meat-processing plant turned artist-run space. A re-edit of JG Ballard’s Crash! and Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy is projected onto the 8.5ft x 18ft ‘screen.’ Part of a compilation of automotive cinema (with Always Nowhere and Redux) using the car as narrative structure for the relationship between auto body and body.

 

A road movie where no one goes anywhere. The car is a membrane between the world and the body - somewhere between a sacrificial pallet, a coffin, and a bed.

Always Nowhere and Always Nowhere Redux draw the perhaps obvious and rather mundane parallel between cars and psychoanalytic spaces.

Liz Roberts, 2013-2014

Liz Roberts, 2014

2 channel HD video, color, sound, 00:02:00

Lift re-proximates and simulates the freight elevator from a long-defunct department store, Lazarus. The elevator shaft retains the painting residue of  previous industry that carried passengers to a commercial wonderland. 

Hoist, 2015

2 channel HD video, color, sound, wired button panel, c-stand

Hoist resulted from a visiting artist residency where cinema students discussed movies as a form of transportation. Each student made an elevator floor video, and a defunct industrial elevator panel was rewired to control the installation.

Liz Roberts, Elena Harvey Collins, 2015

My Body Your Landscape is a road narrative that picks up where the myth of the open road and parallel quest towards self discovery leaves off--the feminized, practical landscape of malls and big-box stores, where driving happens not for the adventure and freedom but the utility of it, where landscape dissolves into suburban traffic, Target, and weaponized mulch.