For the Brookline Library AIR program, Liz Nofziger has proposed a project titled Library Study, which will radically experiment with the many systems, spaces, and structures the Brookline Library has to offer. Beginning with observation, research, and development, she will take the collective sites of the three Brookline Library locations and their systems as the starting point to create a series of interventions that could include video, sculpture, and sound installed into the Library’s public spaces. Ranging from minuscule to massive in scope and scale, these interventions will urge new personal experiences that both subtly and overtly influence, enhance, and shift each patron’s experience of knowing and loving libraries.
She will be in residence at the Brookline Village location of the Public Library of Brookline from June through November 2016.
Liz Nofziger is a site-specific installation artist whose work examines, challenges, and expands relationships we have to our constructed environments. Spontaneity and careful research play equal roles in the development of her work. Shifting perspective and scale, Nofziger works to elevate the mundane within the physical, architectural, political, and pop-cultural landscape. Employing a broad range of media including sculptural elements, video, light, audio, and text, viewer investigation completes her work.
Examples of previous work:
Bounce:
A public art piece created for the Public Artist-in-Residence program at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, 2014
This massive community ping pong table was a colorful, interactive outdoor installation made up of three conjoined, regulation-sized ping pong tables, custom-engineered to form an oversized Community Ping Pong Court. This unique configuration, which was free and open to the public from July through October 2014, encouraged participants – from the proficient to the amateur – to try their skills, make new friends and make up their own rules. All were encouraged to stop and play – paddles and balls were available at no charge around the clock. Each bounce of the ball was captured by microphone and amplified, processed, and played back in real time, adding another element of recreation to the work.
Still photographs by Melissa Blackall Photography at Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 2014.
See and hear documentation of this project here.
Resource:
A site-specific project for the Bentley Library ArtSpace, Northern Essex Community College, Haverhill, MA, 2013
I was immediately struck by the park-like rolling landscape of the Northern Essex Community College campus on my first visit in the late summer.
The Bentley Library Artspace doubles as a gallery and a meeting space. When not in use, it becomes a repository of tables and chairs with art on the walls. This added complexity to creating a site-specific installation that engaged the scale of the space and the exterior landscape its large windows frame.
While researching the history of the land and the school, I was struck by the visionary nature and sense of humor of the college’s founder and library’s namesake, Harold Bentley.
The problematic stacks of utilitarian chairs became the focus, a precarious assemblage crippled of their function for the duration of the show. Media elements draw the landscape outside in and bring a trace of campus history back to life.
Monumento:
A collaborative series of site-specific works at the Colorado State University-Pueblo, Pueblo, CO, 2009
This collaborative series was created with Caroline Peter’s sculpture class at the University of Colorado – Pueblo, the “Home of Heroes”, over three days in 2009. While posing the question, “What constitutes a hero?”, this project identified, investigated, and celebrated the un-sung heroes of Pueblo, CO.
Watch the tumbleweed being released back into the wild here.
Explore more of Liz Nofziger’s work at nofzilla.com.
The Public Library of Brookline 