"A Place Like This" Liz Nielsen at Park House Houston

Liz Nielsen’s work resides on the border between photography and painting. Her fascinating process involves preparing different paper cutouts and rehearsing her movements before entering the darkroom. Then, she places the work on the photosensitive paper in complete darkness, following a preconceived choreography of rehearsed movements. Shining different colored lights over the material's surface, she imprints colors that are then developed with traditional chemicals. Her process is a contemporary interpretation of a primitive photographic technique that does not involve a camera, positioning her as a pioneer in this field.

Her one-of-a-kind images are not mere representations but rather luminous manifestations of abstraction, where the physical process is as vital as the resulting work. Nielsen’s light paintings are charged with metaphors for human connection hidden within her shapes.

Drawing inspiration from various sources—from quantum physics to mysticism—Nielsen invites viewers to explore realms beyond the visible. Her work bridges the gap between the tangible and the ethereal, encouraging us to see light as a medium but also as an analogy for energy, connection, and transformation.

While she works in the dark, there’s a moment of surrender. Much like in real life, we aim at a particular direction with an idea of what we might find, but results can be unpredictable. We learn how to anticipate and adjust, but an element of the unknown is always present. Trusting the process is part of the result.

Liz Nielsen's art challenges our perceptions, demonstrating that light can be both the subject and the storyteller. In doing so, she redefines the possibilities of visual expression and invites us to embrace the unseen and the infinite potential of imagination.

ABOUT LIZ NIELSEN

Liz Nielsen (b. Ashland, WI 1975) is an experimental photographer who explores the boundaries of photography beyond traditional representation or documentary form. Her analog photographs are made without a camera and can be described as light paintings. They are created using a technique developed over the years through experimentation. The works are produced in an analog color darkroom, exposing light sensitive paper and processing it through traditional photographic chemicals, often layering dozens of exposures in a single work. Her work is about harnessing photography’s incredible power to shape space and collapse time, merging a multiplicity of realities into a finite yet dynamic form. Each photograph is unique and ranges in size from 8” x 8” to 100” x 100”.   Nielsen’s imagined forests, totems, moons, and other forms bring to mind Georgia O’Keeffe’s quote that “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way - things I had no words for.”

Nielsen’s photographs have been featured at international art fairs such as Paris Photo, Photo London, AIPAD New York, Unseen Amsterdam, and Landskrona Foto in Sweden. Nielsen’s works have been reviewed in Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The London Financial Times, The British Journal of Photography, The New York Times, LensCulture, FOAM Magazine, and ArtSlant, among others. 

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn and Newburgh, NY.   She received an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2004, her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, and her BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University in 1997.

Nielsen has had residencies at the McColl Center for Arts + Innovation, Charlotte, NC (2020), and the Budapest Art Factory, Budapest, Hungary (2016). She was a finalist for the Meijburg Art Prize at Unseen, Amsterdam (2019).

Nielsen has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including  the Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY (2021), Landskrona Foto, Public Art Installation, Landskrona, Sweden (2020), Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha, Qatar (2020), Mai Manó Ház, Budapest, Hungary (2019).