99
North Main
Rochester, VT 05767
(802) 767-9670
Lily Frisco
Artist Statement:
I consider my work to be a mixture of visual anthropology and magic realism.
I am interested in life at its most extreme, at its most apocalyptic,
and at its most sublime. These images are meant to show an illusion of
static reality breaking down into moments of faith and animism. The pictures
themselves are mostly diptychs portraits combined with abstractions. They
depict characters coming to terms with elements of the beyond. The characters
are caught in moments of realization as if they are suddenly seeing past
shadows on the wall of the cave and looking directly at the world itself
for the first time.
Most of the images contain exits or entrances (portals) from one reality
into the other. These breaks in the material plane of the photograph are
represented as extreme white lights or thick black voids. Sometimes the
portals are clear, sometimes they are small cracks, breaks, glimpses,
or photographic glitches, capable of expanding and morphing to further
distort and fracture standard reality.
This work is not traditionally photographic. It is soft and painterly,
and spatially flat. The voids depicted are similar to the voids found
in the work of Mark Rothko and other color field painters. The images
are grainy, blurry, and impressionistic. Though they resemble paintings,
they are made as photographs because they rely heavily on their basis
in "the real" to propose their suggestions about where magic
and the sublime can be found in the world.
Biography:
Lily is ayoung photographer who studied visual arts at the State University
of New York at Purchase, where she received the Presidential Scholars
award in Photography, and the Joel Salderelli Memorial Award for Visual
Artists. During her time there she held two solo exhibitions of her large-scale
color work in the photography gallery for two consecutive years. She received
a Hallmark grant and held her first solo exhibition at Space 1026 gallery
in Philadelphia. For the two years following her graduation she lived
in Philadelphia, where she worked teaching art to children in inner city
schools and building a photography project involving the aesthetics and
character of the city.