Denny Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Liz Nielsen, Wolf Moon, running from January 29 through March 8, 2015. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Liz Nielsen’s work is a contemporary application of one of the best known and most engaging avant-garde photographic processes, the photogram, whereby an image is created without a camera by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light. Nielsen dislocates the photogram from its historic time period and even from its relationship to photography in the traditional sense, as defined by the notion that an image or impression of an object would be affixed to the paper. Nielsen creates handmade negatives with transparent color gels, which she applies in bold shapes and layers to create shifts in form and color. It is a negative process, so that colors are reversed. It has taken many years of dedicated darkroom experimentation to layer the overlapping shapes so that a subtle color results instead of pure white. The resulting unique chromogenic prints in Wolf Moon are singed with red from leaked light in the darkroom and populated by abstract shapes reminiscent of terrestrial and extraterrestrial forms. The light that beams down to expose the photograph is the invisible character of this body of work, witnessed by the moons and asteroids and mountains suspended in the black space of the image.

Liz Nielsen was born in Wisconsin in 1975 and lives and works in New York City. She received a M.F.A. in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nielsen’s work has been exhibited extensively in Chicago, New York, and Berlin; her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Schalter Gallery (Berlin), Benrimon Contemporary (New York City), Interlochen Center for the Arts (Interlochen, MI) and concurrently at Laurence Miller Gallery (New York). Nielsen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artslant, Hyperallergic, and the Wall Street Journal.