Opening Reception: Saturday July 1, 7pm to 9pm
Second Gallery is pleased to present Grate, a new installation by Liz Nofziger. Second Gallery continues to meet its goal of serving as a project space in which artists can explore and realize their projects in full during a two-week installation period. Directly referencing a large metal grate in the unique multi-level gallery, Nofziger will cultivate this new immersive multimedia work directly in the space during the intensive installation. Primarily investigating the viewer's physical experience of the space from the numerous vantage points, she will reference building lore, historic facts, pop-culture, and current events.
Using video, found objects, and sculptural elements, Nofziger creates interactive spaces that are physically and conceptually linked to the room in which they are built. She explores themes of contemporary and historical popular culture, politics, and religion with a keen focus on the disregarded details of everyday life. Nostalgia is a driving force in Nofziger's work, both typically as nostalgia for cultural and commercial remnants of past decades, and in the sense that she nostalgically approaches excessive and disregarded materials of the present moment. She emphasizes tiny, precious, obsolete, and often grotesque details, leaving the viewer poised between attraction and repulsion, caught between humor and gravity. Nofziger often reaches these goals by working with reversals in scale: a disco ball stretches from floor to ceiling, video loops on a 2 inch monitor discarded on the floor. Nofziger accumulates, rearranges, and transforms cultural materials of yesterday and today, creating odd and powerful juxtapositions while offering sharp cultural criticism.
Liz Nofziger is a Boston-based multimedia artist who received her MFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media department at Massachusetts College of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Kult 41 (Bonn, Germany), The Cheekwood Museum of Art (Nashville, TN), Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, MA),the Sante Fe Art Institute (Sante Fe, NM), and at the Contemporary Artists Center (North Adams, MA). Nofziger has received funding from The Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Visit her website at www.nofzilla.com.
GRATE by Liz Nofziger will be on view from June 24 - July 29, 2006 with an opening reception on Saturday July 1, from 7 to 9 pm. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 6pm. The Distillery. 516 East 2nd Street, South Boston, MA 02127.
W: www.secondgallery.org E: secondgallery@gmail.com T: 617 413 9395