Lizzy De Vita has described her work as a “constellation of media.” At Barnard College she studied English Literature and Art History, and was trained in Printmaking at Columbia University. During her last two years of college, she began interning at Pace Editions Inc. Working in the digital department; Lizzy De Vita learned essential digital processes that contribute to her current practice. De Vita’s body of work includes traditional printmaking, but her work mainly consists of sculptural and digital works that relate to printmaking concepts of transferring information from one media to another. She is one of many artists that Recession Art is exhibiting in Prolonged Exposure.

Prolonged Exposure will feature Lizzy De Vita’s video installation I Don’t Re//member (I’ve Heard That Story a Thousand Times). The artwork began as an hour-long video of the artist recounting a personal and secret story in private, but the piece is more complex than just being a means to broadcast a confessional excerpt. In the final stages of I Don’t Re//member (I’ve Heard That Story a Thousand Times), the original video is once again concealed by turning the camera back around at the artist as she watches and reacts to herself multiple times. Sometimes displayed as nine video monitors, and other times displayed as a single, nine-channel video, the work’s fragmented soundtrack will leave a viewer attempting to fit the pieces of the story together, and becoming increasingly aware of their own desire for clarity.

I Don’t Re//member (I’ve Heard That Story a Thousand Times) is a piece that relies almost entirely on what a viewer is missing out on. We are meant to want more, and the scrambling of this previously earnest and sincere message may make this artwork seem subversive to the very idea of meaning and cohesive story telling.

This video suggests a method of interpreting De Vita’s body of work as a whole. She is an artist that is not only interested in context, but uses what some consider superfluous media, such as the web, as a contribution to her art. If you visit her website, you will notice that this digital space is “occupied” and to a certain extent, I Don’t Re//member (I’ve Heard That Story a Thousand Times) and De Vita’s place in Prolonged Exposure is completed by her words.

“AT- The piece that you are showing in Prolonged Exposure is called I Don’t Re//member (I’ve Heard That Story a Thousand Times). For someone who is unfamiliar with the piece, can you give us a description of the work?

LDV-Sure. I see this piece as actually two pieces. The first was this private performance that I did, which could have ended in anything. The second was what you actually see in the gallery, which is a separate thing.

The (first/performance-y) piece started out like an experiment. I wanted to see whether I could control, isolate and document the death of a story. I was interested in the idea of something intangible being a sort of precious, finite medium.

I thought for a long time about a true story that I’d never told anybody before, and then filmed myself telling it. I chose one that was lengthy enough to elicit a range of emotions, and one that would be difficult to memorize; it ended up being about an hour and six minutes long. Then I let it sit for about six months so I could forget about it.

Then one day, I set up a little studio with a green screen and lighting, and brought a TV monitor in. I played the DVD with the original “mint-condition” story on it, and filmed myself watching it. I watched it nine times in a row, sitting for about 10 hours. I hoped that I might watch it for long enough that I’d start to feel the story losing its power, and also I wanted to see if my self-awareness would diminish or disappear as a side effect of the duration.

In the end, like an experiment, and like most good things I find in art, predictions and plans don’t always match up with the final “results.” My experience of the private performance differed from what I’d expected it to be. For one, the story itself seemed to change in my mind each time I heard it. I’d focus in on different parts each time. For instance, initially I’d find some aspects funny, and then later I wouldn’t even notice. My attention would wane, and then a word or phrase would cue me back in and it would feel as though I’d only heard that particular segment for the first time. Basically, the story refused to die. It actually noticeably and tangibly evolved in my head. My initial intention was to stop when it felt flat, and it didn’t feel anywhere close to being flat, even in the ninth sitting. And, even though I was completely alone, my own self-awareness kind of sauntered in and out. In this particular format and time span, I couldn’t ‘trick’ myself out of knowing that I was being filmed, that what I filmed would eventually be watched.

The piece that you see in the gallery is in part the residue of all of these experiences, but it also has its own unique set of concerns that do not have anything to do with its own coming to be. There were a lot of things that really surprised me when I watched all the footage for the first time. For instance — there are these physical ticks that emerge in clusters that I had no consciousness of. Like exactly an hour apart in the third and fourth telling, I lean forward and scratch my ear. Or in another two or three videos I’ll be putting my hair behind my ear at exactly the same time, at the same part in the story. I felt totally naive to have thought that I could understand the experience on a conscious level. Watching the footage, I learned that actually I had no idea what was going on in my little head. So — watching what I had, and continuing to learn in this way influenced my decision-making process when I was re-translating it to something that other people could view.

With the gallery piece, I wanted to create a similar scenario, where I’d attempt to control things, and then give it enough air to do what it wanted in space. I had all of these rules set out. Like. It had to be low. I wanted people to feel like they owned it. It couldn’t be in a straight line. I also needed the “listening/tellings” to be shown in a uniform format — thus the white greenscreen and the identical monitors. I wanted to create a complex, but unified psychological landscape in time and space. The sound for each video is unique: fragmented bits of the second-generation recording of the original story. Seen and heard together, the videos make a sort of dynamic panorama of disembodied micro-reactions, with sparse, but immersive waves of words and sound. After a while, though, because the videos do not have the same exact duration time, the organization that I imposed on the format just starts to unravel itself as they continue to loop. That way different associations and coincidences can emerge over time.

I should mention that none of this actually matters. This is the type of information that I expect to be lost, one way or another. I want to privilege potential viewers with the opportunity to be totally lost in the piece for a little while at least. I guess that wasn’t very brief, was it? Whoops.

AT- Each time you watched the video of you telling this story, it lasted about an hour. How did you feel by the ninth hour?

LDV- In brief, I felt pretty weird. There were parts of the story that I actually did not hear. My mind was elsewhere. And then I’d hear a word or a phrase, and my attention would snap back to the story, and I’d start second-guessing myself. Like — had I actually said that before? I knew that I had, because I was watching the exact same telling on a loop. After I showed the piece for the first time, it got the attention of this neuroscientist. I met with him and had a really exciting talk, where he basically explained to me that he was noticing something very similar (to what I’d experienced) was happening at the cellular level in the brains of chimpanzees. He was looking at spike patterns in large-scale neuronal networks, tracking how and when their little brain cells would fire when they watched a very short clip of Run Lola Run. Basically, a very similar thing happened, where the cells would go crazy for the first few viewings in a certain part of the clip, and then, seemingly at random, the cells would start buzzing around at a different part altogether. That was pretty cool to talk about with him, and it made my own, impossible to prove, but nonetheless failed hypothesis seem more valid. I was wrong, but I was also right!

AT- You have quite a bit of traditional printmaking experience. You’ve worked at places like Pace Editions in New York and also Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh. How has your knowledge of printmaking contributed to your growth as a new media artist?

LDV- I  don’t consider myself as a “new media” artist, or really any kind of artist. If my work necessitated the use of a traditional form of making, then I’d probably figure out how to do it and do it. I actually like the good old “traditional” stuff a little better, I am very at home when I’m inking a plate or just drawing or getting messy. But right now, my work has taken a turn in this direction because it just felt necessary as a means of communicating something or other.

I may have experience in traditional printmaking, but it should be said that I’m a shitty printmaker. It’s probably because I can’t always follow directions perfectly, not because I am incapable of making a good, clean print, but because I do not always see a point. (Yes, I am incredibly immature. Why do you ask?).

With printmaking you learn to treat your body like a machine. You have to relinquish a lot of what they teach you to hold onto in painting. You have to think more about the sequencing of events and order of operations and this idea that the thing that you are making in a multiple object. It frees you of the typical constraints of other forms, which promote the artistic genius and ideas of ownership.

Ultimately, though, I realized that I didn’t want to be a printmaker, but that it was these ideas that I was really into. My big leap to video and installation and stuff happened after I learned more about digital printmaking at Pace. I did some relatively intense pieces using a CNC-mill, and the more challenging and process-heavy a piece was, the more I seemed to like it. The more my work became about process, the more logical it was to enter into time-based media. But it’s all just shifting all the time. I could go into why that is, but I don’t want to talk your ear off.

AT- You have a work called Untitled (The Question) or (Forgiving Richard Serra, Part 1) which uses an unpublished Richard Serra interview from 1985 as a script, and some of your other works seem Serra-influenced. Would you cite Richard Serra as an influence or inspiration for your work?

Images from "Untitled (The Question) and (Forgiving Richard Serra, Part I)"

LDV- It’s funny you ask. First of all, the whole concept of “influence” or “inspiration” is weird. I look at stuff all the time, we all do, and it just sort of creates base of mud which, when I’m making stuff, feels really squishy between my toes. It’s hard to look at that muck and be like, “Yep, I’d say we have roughly 1.7% Richard Serra in there.” It doesn’t work that way. That said, I do love it when people identify influences in my work, though. It makes me feel all the more part of a big family. That said, this particular piece was inevitably “influenced” by him because I was using his words as a primary source. So, in a manner of speaking, yes.

That all said, it should be said that when I made that piece, my knowledge of Richard Serra was pretty limited. Here’s what I knew: I was aware of his early work with the lead, from a course I took in college. I was also aware that he’d worked with Matthew Barney at one point because when I was in high school, I took a trip to the Guggenheim when the Cremaster Cycle was on view. Then the only other thing I really knew about him was he made this big sculpture outside of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. I grew up with this piece, and didn’t really start noticing it at all until I came back to Pittsburgh after college. I remember talking on the phone and walking around and around it, and I didn’t realize what I was doing ‘til I’d been doing it for a while and then I just kind of looked at this thing, and really noticed it. The thing is, the pieces were all so different, that I didn’t really tie them to the same person in my mind. Maybe I was just being lazy.

With that piece in particular, I was really interested in preserving my relative naïveté with regard to his person/character/work. I didn’t watch any interviews with him, and didn’t read any other interviews either. I didn’t want it to be theater. And I didn’t want it to be mimicry. Or impersonation. I was interested in what would happen if I actually operated under the assumption that words he had said — words that another person had then heard and transcribed — were actually my own. This is just slightly different than all of that, but it is an important distinction I think. That means, I practiced the pronunciation of every type-o, and created logic behind accidental leaps in text, or intentional leaps in logic, and other “problems” with the material. This, by the way, is the forgiveness aspect. The term “forgiveness” seemed the closest to what I was trying to do. People often think of forgiveness as a conscious psychological release of an act of wrongdoing, or a transgression of some sort, that has been imposed by another person onto the person whose job it is then to forgive. So they associate it with wrongdoing. A lot of people also think that to forgive requires some measure of understanding. So they associate it with understanding. In this case, there was no wrongdoing, and no attempts to understand. It was more about possession. I was making an earnest attempt to assume full ownership of somebody else’s words, without judging them or questioning their motivations. I didn’t think much about it, aside from this overarching premise of wanting to own the words, and really just reside within the space of that (gloriously imperfect) text. Ultimately the piece is neither a representation of me nor of Richard Serra nor of me trying to be Richard Serra. You know what I mean?

AT- Where does your work fit into the concept of prolonged exposure?

LDV- I feel like I’m giving our poor readers prolonged exposure to the true extent of my already overt self-obsession. So, if you didn’t get it from my first answer, let me put it this way: when I saw the submission form, it said, “Works for Prolonged Exposure may engage durational, automatic, repetitive, or tedious strategies, or seek to distract a viewer from object to ambience.” It was like a personals ad for the piece, so I submitted it. “

Don’t  miss your chance to see I Don’t Re//member (I’ve Heard That Story a Thousand Times) at the opening of Prolonged Exposure on Saturday November 3 from 6-10 pm at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn.

All images courtesy of Lizzy De Vita.

-Anthony