Liz Rodda

Liz Rodda’s work involves investing found materials, primarily video, with meanings unintended by the original maker. This process begins with a broad search online and in the physical world. After developing an archive of material to work with, her role shifts from a collector to a curator of sorts. The disparate materials she collects are then paired, manipulated, and reframed to enable new interpretations.

The videos in Heat Loss use voice-over as a strategy to reframe the images presented on screen. Also known as off-camera, voice-overs are often used in TV, film, and radio as a device to deliver information or to narrate a story. In Rodda’s work, the voices she finds play with and against the moving images that accompany them. Manipulated and reduced in speed, the disembodied voices alternate between interpretive texts and anonymous monologues.

Thematically, the works engage with topics that are as diverse and fragmented as YouTube, the primary source of the footage. Topics range from troubling issues around the politics of representation, to the Internet as a place that paradoxically promises access to so much and so little at the same time.

As a whole, Heat Loss re-introduces the complex nature of remaking images and the instability of their meaning. In Recycled Images William Wees writes, “Whatever the filmmaker may do to them – including nothing more than reproduce them exactly as he or she found them recycled images call attention to themselves as images.” In essence, reusing footage sets up a double meaning. The footage evokes the motives of the original maker as well as that of the new one.

Liz Rodda is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Her work has been presented in at institutions such as the Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL. This fall she was a Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecturer at CalArts. She is an Associate Professor at Texas State University where she heads the Expanded Media area.

This exhibition contains adult content that may be inappropriate for children.