BIFF OFFSCREEN: Brace

Saturday, October 12 through Thursday, October 17 (Open during Buffalo Arts Studio's regular hours of operation).

Hydrocal, Fiberglass + Steel, 53" x 32" x 18"

Brace is part of the commonwealth series, a set of five Interstitial Castings commissioned by Buffalo Arts Studio in 2018.

These works center the, often taken for granted, intimate choreographies of care and labor.

They document the social, physical, and emotional support provided by local health and human service organizations like Aspire WNY, Inc. iXpress, Cantalician/Diversified Labor Solutions, and the Buffalo Arts Studio Jump Start program. Interstitial Castings are negative space castings of people enacting their relationship through gesture. This interstitial casting is the negative space between an art therapist and her client during a session.

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About the Artist:

Liz Lessner is a sculptor whose work combines traditional fabrication techniques and emerging technologies to create novel sensory experiences. These often-interactive objects stage encounters that reframe common occurrences and routine happenings. She was the 2023-24 Nadine Carter Russel Endowed Chair in the School of Art, Louisiana State University and a 2019 Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the Department of Expressions and Languages at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro as well as the CrossLab Research Group and the Lab for Innovation and Prototyping at the University of Fortaleza in Ceará, Brazil. Lessner has had solo shows at the Front in New Orleans, LA; VisArts in Rockville, MD; Honfleur Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and The University of Oregon’s Eric Washburne Gallery in Eugene, OR. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including A.I.R. gallery in Brooklyn, NY; The CrossLab for Innovation and Prototyping at the University of Fortaleza in Fortaleza, Brazil; the Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacán, Mexico; and Everard Read’s Circa Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. She has an MFA in Media Study from the University at Buffalo.

She is the founder of the Sensory Engagement Lab, a community-based research platform that fosters collaborations between artists, technologists, and other thinkers to produce interactive and experimental art works. In 2020 she and Mat Keel co-founded Yes We Cannibal. Their collaboration results in artworks, artifacts, and a relational aesthetics project in the form of a Baton Rouge, LA based experimental project space for art, performance, and social research.

For more info, please visit: www.lizlessner.com.

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Presented in partnership with Buffalo Arts Studio.

Images courtesy of the artist.