Feature Artist

Liz Nofziger
Installation Artist--Boston, Massachusetts

Kim Stauffer: What is your discipline?
Liz: I make site-specific installations, allowing the physical space and its past and present uses to inform the work. I use video, sound, light, and sculptural elements to transform space.

I am fascinated by what we overlook within the architectures we inhabit. I examine and excavate the layered pasts of a space and/or object, reorganizing in light of contemporary culture and current events. Sparked by religion, politics, pop-culture, and personal experience, these site manipulations are comprised of familiar, benign elements re-configured, thereby blurring the lines between attraction and repulsion, high and low. Playing with perspective, voyeurism, and humor, I consider scale and demand physical involvement and curiosity from the viewer.

Tell me about your process. How do your ideas form and develop?
My work is very much about process. There’s always a large research component. The extremely site-based works I make rely heavily on spontaneity, and being capable of living with uncertainty--a sort of faith that I will find the elements that “make” the installation work. I find that my work is most successful when I allow this open space for spontaneity and trust that I will find the elements that need to come together to give it the complexity that it needs.

The complete interview is published at MennoniteArtistProject.com. Mennonite Artist Project is open to Mennonite-related artists of any discipline.