An interview with
Elizabeth Leister In your work "Burn" we have been struck by the way you use high densely layered pattern, realizing a digital video presenting analogue and material qualities: glimpses and scratches present an incredible guestuoral nature on the screen. Could you take us through your creative process of "Burn"? I’ve worked in video for over fifteen years but I continually return to working with my hands – touching and manipulating physical materials. My video has been described as tactile or painterly and I think that is a primary aspect of all of my work. For this project, I shot footage of the scorched landscape very soon after the wildfire. This imagery serves as the primary layer of the video providing movement, texture and the suggestion of a horizon line and a sense of perspective, although that becomes quite skewed and remains fairly abstract. Using a software program, many additional layers are added and blended together. This includes lines that animate, changing size and color in ranges of brightness and saturation among other transformations. This part of my process is very intuitive.
Elizabeth Leister
MFA in sculpture from Bard College. Soon after graduate school, I started working in digital media but the ideas and techniques that I learned as a student are deeply embedded in who I am as a digital artist. Working traditionally will always feel very natural to me. Often my work is a combination of hand-made, analogue approaches and the digital using diverse methods that are project dependent.
I think of “Burn” as a moving painting where the layering of transparent shapes of color and the gestural strokes of a paintbrush are mimicked through technology. Each frame is a composition, and it is exciting to craft each transition. Creating seamless shifts in color, value and texture that unfold into new shapes, lines and perspectives is what sets this process apart from creating a static image. The program allows for erasing back through a series of layered strokes – an undoing of the imagery, which interests me. It is digital mark-making without any physical connection to real materiality.
Burn is inspired by the work of early abstract filmmakers such as female pioneer, Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, and Stan Brakhage. As a student studying painting, I was not exposed to these artists or this type of work. However, I was deeply influenced by line, shape and gesture in the work of the Abstract Expressionists - seemingly static versions of these moving abstract films. Jackson Pollock was particularly important to me but probably for different reasons than I think about him now. I love those big energetic paintings but now I’m also interested in those works as gesture and performance.
It is evident the influence of abstract painters on your work, though this aspect is treated in an original and radical way. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? My background is in the fine arts. I received a BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art and an
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