Liz makes her photographs in a completely dark environment. Without the use of a camera, she builds her own negatives and paints with light. Using flashlights, laser lights, and her cell phone, she spills light onto the paper. Transparent shapes are cut out with scissors and layered on top of plastic.

Handmade cardboard puzzles are taken apart and put together in the darkness allowing multiple exposures to emerge on the light sensitive paper. The light bleeds and is also contained. She enjoys working this way because everything is variable. It is impossible to create the same image twice making each photogram unique.

In her most recent work, made at BAF, there is a focus on transcendence through abstraction and recontextualization. When the body is placed in a new environment, the stars above are aligned differently and two worlds collide, the inner with the outer.

Liz’s photographs attempt to fold time and space making her landscapes feel like daydreams, her still lives dislocated from the gravity of the present, and her images of monuments and sculptures appear to contain projected virtual realities.

Liz presents long panoramic mountain ranges from a place other than planet earth, floating hair with missing heads, weightless stacks of shapes and color, billboards and political signs without messages used instead as frames for meditation and solitude.

Liz Nielsen is a New York based artist who works as a light painter in the analog color darkroom. In April 2016, Nielsen had a solo exhibition at Danziger gallery in New York. In June, her light collages were in a two-person show in Cork Co. Cobh Ireland at the Sirius Art Center.

Last year, Nielsen had 3 solo exhibitions: Night Garden at SOCO gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, Magic Lantern at Laurence Miller gallery in NYC and Wolf Moon at Denny gallery in NYC. Her recent exhibitions have been reviewed in the New Yorker, Art21, Charlotte Magazine, and Beautiful Decay. Nielsen received her MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In February, Liz Nielsen will be returning to Budapest for a solo-exhibition with Horizont Gallery.

Liz Nielsen: Shapeshifting
Opening: Tuesday, October 4, 2016 6-8. pm
Budapest Art Factory, Project Space

Venue: Budapest Art Factory
Address: 1138 Budapest, Váci út 152-156.
Phone: +36 20 570 7724
by car: H-1138 Budapest, Vizafogó utca 2.

More: www.budapestartfactory.com