Presented in conjunction with the museum's 75th anniversary, January 18–August 18, 2025
Liz Deschenes (American, b. 1966), FPS (60), 2018. Gelatin silver photograms mounted to Dibond. Pinault Collection. Exhibition view, Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2018. © the artist, courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, and Emanuela Campoli, Paris. artist, courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Emanuela Campoli, Paris; and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
The George Eastman Museum presents Frames per Second (Silent) by renowned artist Liz Deschenes. The exhibition is on view January 18–August 18, 2025, presented in conjunction with the museum’s 75th anniversary. Working with photographic media and their histories, Liz Deschenes deconstructs conventional photographic and cinematic systems with a mixture of devotion and irreverence.
These new works draw connections among the museum’s collections of photography, film, and technology, testing the potential of these media to reproduce (and produce) perceptions of time and color. Deschenes probes how such technologies are themselves unstable and subject to change. The artist says, “Moving images become still objects, and still objects become moving images.”
The heart of the exhibition explores the variable frame rates of early silent film. In cinema's early decades, frame rates were not standardized, with pacing determined by the hands of camera operators and projectionists. Deschenes’s Frames per Second series (2018–present) features large-scale, silver-toned photograms arranged in a row, with the number of elements corresponding to a specific frame rate from the history of film. Deschenes selected three early cinema rates—12, 16, and 18 frames per second. The photograms, sized and positioned according to these rates, are intermixed and installed within the Potter Peristyle, with each bay representing one second of cinematic time. As visitor’s move across FPS (12/16/18) (2018–2024), the photograms’ sequencing of space offers a poetic experience of these different articulations of time.
“Liz Deschenes is one of the most exciting artists working with photography today,” said Phil Taylor, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, George Eastman Museum. “Displaying characteristic conceptual rigor, material specificity, and poetic reward, her exhibition offers an exceptional opportunity to consider the capacious category of objects and practices that make up ‘the photographic’ in the context of a museum uniquely devoted to the histories of photography and the moving image.”
The other works bookending the installation turn to often overlooked features of photographic production and display—filters, screens, color separation channels, standard sizes, shelves, brackets, walls—that determine the landscape of what is visible or imperceptible, seen or occluded. This includes a yellow monochrome from the artist’s recent body of work of inkjet prints on Gorilla Glass, and an entirely new work, Study Shelf, 2024–2025, which utilizes scarce and long-discontinued yellow Kodak dye transfer dye that the artist has dyed—rather than printed—on Epson matte paper.
None of the works on view were made with a camera. The exhibition proposes a novel encounter between visitors’ embodied experiences and image-making processes, offering alternative ways of looking and thinking.
The presentation of Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent) situates the artist’s work in direct dialogue with nearby long-term displays of early cinematographic cameras and apparatuses, Technicolor dyes, and the exhibition Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum.
Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent) is generously made possible by Deborah Ronnen. With additional support from John Benis and Elaine Goldman. Major support for the 75th Anniversary exhibitions provided by the Rubens Family Foundation.
For ticket information, hours, and other details, visit eastman.org.
Public Program
Artists in Conversation: Liz Deschenes with curator Phil Taylor
Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Dryden Theatre
About Liz Deschenes
Described by critic Martha Schwendener as “one of the quiet giants of post-conceptual photography” in the New York Times, Liz Deschenes lives and works in New York. Solo institutional exhibitions of her work include Liz Deschenes, ICA Boston (2016); Gallery 4.1.1, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2015); Gallery 7, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); Parcours, with Florian Plumhösl, Art Institute of Chicago (2012); and the Secession, Vienna (2012). Deschenes’s work has also been included in notable recent group exhibitions at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris, and Punta della Dogana, Venice; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ICA Los Angeles; and Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany. Her work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among others.
About the George Eastman Museum
Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the United States, located on the historic Rochester estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. Its holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs, 28,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related to George Eastman. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active publishing program, and its L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation’s graduate program (a collaboration with the University of Rochester) makes critical contributions to film preservation. For more information, visit eastman.org.
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ATTN. Media: High-resolution images for Frames per Second (Silent) can be provided by request.
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Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent)
