LINCOLN, MASS.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announced Liz Deschenes as the fifteenth recipient of the prestigious Rappaport Prize, an annual award of $25,000 given to an established contemporary artist with strong connections to New England. The Rappaport Prize is among the most generous awards of its kind in the region. In 2010, the Rappaport Prize was endowed in perpetuity by the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation, assuring the ongoing support of contemporary art and artists in New England.
“Liz Deschenes is a wonderful choice for this distinguished prize,” notes Katy Kline, Interim Executive Director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. “Her deft and inventive interventions into photographic materials and processes are concerned with perception rather than description, and her beautiful and mysterious works align closely with deCordova’s emphasis on photography and sculpture.”
Described by the New York Times as a “quiet giant of post-conceptual photography,” Liz Deschenes is one of the foremost artists working in photography today. Deschenes uses the direct and camera- less exposure of a photogram to challenge the notion of the photograph as a singular “decisive moment.”
In her recent work, Deschenes has exposed photographic paper to ambient light from the outdoors and toned the prints with silver, resulting in shimmering surfaces with shifting hues that continue to develop and darken over time. Mounted on panels, the photographs lay claim physically to the spaces in which they are installed. As such, these prints become objects and push the medium into sculptural territory. In this way, Deschenes questions the photograph as reproducible, instantaneous, and fixed image.
Deschenes comments: “I'm so grateful to the Rappaports for their generosity, and for what the grant from their foundation can do for my upcoming projects. It is so important to invest in an artist's beginnings, like this grant admirably does for artists in the region. Being from New England, I am dedicated to maintaining an active relationship with this community.”
Born in Boston in 1966, Liz Deschenes lives and works in New York. Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Deschenes’ work was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She has received awards from Anonymous Was A Woman and the Aaron Siskind Foundation. Deschenes has recently mounted exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Campoli Presti, London and Paris; and the Secession, Vienna, Austria. She has an upcoming exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, opening in November 2014.
Deschenes received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Since 2006, she has been a member of the faculty of Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.
