Elizabeth Stephens

Work and Process, Work in Process

This artist's lecture is a comprehensive look at Stephens’ work for the last 12 years. Within this lecture, viewers will be privy to the circumference of Stephens’ artistic endeavors, visiting the many angles of sculpture, installation, photography, video and Internet projects that arc into a decade plus of interweaving narratives.

“My sculptural installation and intermedia work are a material investigation of the meaningful space created by the interaction between various technologies, objects and physical sites. The pieces I produce combine steel fabrication, mechanical devices, electronic components, and video to produce kinetic works that occupy a space between sculpture and installation. I often use technological representations (such as video) in sites that physical bodies once occupied or could potentially occupy. This allows me to examine the uncanny ability these technologies possess to construct, survey, ignore or empower various groups of people. In my work, these sites move from the domestic to the public and sometimes merge these spaces into one entity, complicating the distinction between social interiors and exteriors.”

For instance, in the quilt produced from various images of America from her multimedia investigation, Wish You Were Here, Stephens allows the domesticated, socially-gendered activity of quilt-making to take a vacation from the laps of historical women and travel across the country, documenting a new series of histories to pass along the generations.

American Vortex: Work in Process

In American Vortex Stephens continues her examination of post 9-11 American culture to reveal the series of relationships between five American sites that are joined by their socially currency and atmospheric commonalties. These would include that these sites are important places of American culture, that they are popular tourist destinations, they have been targets of terrorist action or threat and they all carry moral weight in our country. The five sites are the World Trade Tower Site, the Pentagon and other military locations in Washington D.C, the Las Vegas Strip, Temple Square in Salt Lake City and finally Disneyland. Stephens has used photography to document the sites as well as her movements through them using specific means to navigate each one. For instance on the Strip in Las Vegas, periodic rolls of the dice determined where she would go and how she would get there. In Disneyland she was excitedly guided through the park by her partner, a native of Southern California, who had spent a great deal of time during her childhood going to Disneyland as a regular family ritual.

This is a sneek preview into my work in progress, and demonstrates my style of working. This lecture is currently in the form of a PowerPoint slide presentation but it will soon include a multi media web component, which is presently under construction.

Wish You Were Here

Elizabeth Stephens presents her rite of passage interstate/internet performance piece Wishyouwerehere. For several months beginning on September 11th 2002 and lasting through the beginning of 2003 Stephens drove across US highways in a quest to accomplish given tasks that others had assigned her. Stephens became their travel avatar, their carrier pigeon for the spreading of their emotional rituals and as the ultimate body extension where she performed personal, political and urgent acts and rituals for other people. This piece is reflective of her interest in the technological progression of America, which is evident in her movements throughout the country, collecting research, performing requests. She became a DSL Connection herself, where the gratification of a deed was received not through lived-experience, but through confirmation by way of the internet projecting from a computer screen in one’s home or office. Wishyouwerehere was a beautiful, provocative connector between the imagination of a nation and the tools through which we continue to create progress. View the WYWH web site at: http://wishyouwerehere.ucsc.edu

Post Porn Love

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens present the super sexy story of their work together as artists who are lovers and collaborators. Sprinkle is an internationally renowned prostitute/porn star turned Ph.D. sexologist. Stephens is a multimedia installation artist and Associate Professor of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They met in the early nineties when Stephens curated one of Sprinkle’s “Tit Prints” into the exhibition, “Outrageous Desire.” Ten years passed by during which time they orbited each other’s galaxies but were never quite in the same place at the same time. Then in 2002 they both attended a Eileen Myles poetry reading in San Francisco. Afterwards they chatted about experimental writing and the rest is Art/Life history in the making.