July 2016 Artist in Residency: ELIZABETH BICK
Image from Every God, 2015
This month we're welcoming Oli Rodriguez as our Artist in Residence!
In the month of July, we are happy to host Elizabeth Bick as our Artist in Residence!
Elizabeth Bick is a photographer based in New York City. She received a MFA in Photography from Yale University and a BFA in Photography from Loyola University. She has participated in residencies at American Academy in Rome, Santa Fe Art Institute, Chateau La Napoule, LMCC, and has received grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston. Her work has been exhibited at Fraenkel Gallery, Aperture Foundation, Proposition Gallery, Lincoln Center, and Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Art News, Interview Magazine, Lenscratch, NY Times, Paper Journal, Photograph Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Vice Magazine, and Huffington Post have featured her photographs.
Elizabeth is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute and a lecturer at School of Visual Arts in the photography department. She is preparing for a solo exhibition at the University of Texas VAC.
We asked Elizabeth to share some insight into her practice.
In your work, it feels as though the viewer gets a sense of the motion before and after the moment of capture. Could you speak to the ways you think about the movement of the body in relation to static imagery?
The still medium of photography is inherently unsuited to truly capturing movement. I use my work to contemplate and challenge this idea. I think about movement, whether under the veil of a dance, or an unthinking quotidian gesture, as a performance, a core thesis of my work that I continue to redefine. When individuals are collective observers, their negotiation of space, gaze, and self presentation is choreographed dance.
Your photographs evoke a performance where a subject reveals themselves as a player in the environment and amongst the other players. What is your role as a photographer in staging or choreographing the outcome of the images?
In revisiting the tradition of street photography through the eyes of a female dancer, I seek to take practices of the genre further into a more compelling fixation on the constant presence of individual and collective choreography. Most of my pictures are a result of locating a public pedestrian space with no evident signage of geo-location. I then use various methods to capture seemingly banal fleeting movements as performances. Through architecture and piercing light, and this coexistence strangers, I reveal a dramaturgy. The work becomes evidence of formations unintentionally made by strangers, merely by empathically negotiating space. When photographing individuals on the street, the represent a performance given for the camera. Everyone is an archetype.
What are you most excited to complete during your residency at LATITUDE?
I am thrilled to refine a new iteration of the series Every God. I returned from this site one week previous to arriving at LATITUDE, and plan to spend this time refining a new archive of images. Having access to DIY drum scanning is a huge gift from LATITUDE.
Stop by the lab and say hello. Be sure to eep an eye out for an opportunity to attend Elizabeth's Saturday workshop!
View more of Elizabeth's work at erbick.com