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Essay
by Emmanuel Cooper
Artist's
Statement on New Work
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New York Times,
August 11, 2000
Art in Review
Lucas Schoormans
508 West 26th St
Chelsea
For 15 years Liz Rideal has made the photo-booth, that popular dispenser of
instant mug shots, her primary tool. Many artists have toyed with low-budget
technology but few have explored its formal possibilities so extensively as
the British photographer, who is having her first New York solo show.
Early on Ms Rideal departed from the conventional photo booth portrait Works
from 1996 to 1998, on show here, focus on colored fabrics that the artist
manipulates before the camerass unwavering eye, producing a kind of
photographic update of Color Field painting. In the best works here, she collages
hundreds of the four-shot strips into large grids. Up close in "Arras
Suite Red" you can see each little picture shows a slightly crumpled
expanse of red cloth. From a distance, more than 800 little red squares coalesce
into a lush, vibrating field.
In other works, Ms.Rideal re photographs photo booth strips and makes montages
of enlarged frames, "Green Veil," which measures about 4 by 20 feet
is a grid of two dozen frames, each a different image of translucent green
chiffon floating, fluttering or twisting against a white background. (In one
frame, the artists fingers appear, revealing off-camera performance).
These are less richly concentrated than the collages made from the original
strips, but they have an elegant interplay of sensuous fluidity and rhythmic
order.
Ken Johnson, The New Yorker
Photography
August 21 & 28, 2000
LIZ RIDEAL
English artist Rideals first New York solo show is full of colour images
of fabric taken in a photo booth romantic, minimalist work that mixes
the formality and ephemerality of Agnes Martins pictures with the curvy,
textile-draped femininity of Veroneses. In "Arras Suite Red,"
hundreds of four-picture photo strips mounted together create a Muybridge-like
meditation on the movement of a piece of Indian silk. For "Pigs
Ear," pink fabric someralults across a black background, inanimate, but
somehow loaded with playful and lyrical humanity.
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