KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Künstler*innen

Lisi Raskin

USA

All day I played a game to see if I could forget but every time I turned around, there you were, 2004.

Lisi Raskin 1974 in Miami (USA). Lives in New York.

Technology and science are fields of wonder for children and adults alike. Chemistry sets, video games, and most recently the realm of the Internet have become tools that provide people, at any age, with the fuel and elements necessary to further their desire to explore and discover, to conquer and destroy. As an artist Lisi Raskin continues her childhood passion and curiosity towards these fields, but as an adult she masks her naivety with a sense of fear and tentativeness.Her projects include mock test sites, fictional neurotic scientists and make-believe spaceships that are at once playful and carefree but also laden with anxiety and fear. […]

Raskin’s interest in the physical spaces of experiments and research is rooted in their potential to be locations of death and disaster. Her most recent work, = (2004), is a landscape portrait that examines and compares three different sites: the desert, an active nuclear power plant and an Olympic diving and swimming pool that was once a large Jewish cemetery. […]

The imagery is beautiful yet eerie and the artist’s interjection of juvenile humor acts as leverage to the frightening possibilities of these sites.

(Excerpt from an essay by Jeffrey Walkowiak, 2003.)

STAY
30.06. – 17.07.2005