Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent)
Liz Deschenes (American, b. 1966). Exhibition view, Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent), George Eastman Museum, 2025. © the artist, courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Emanuela Campoli, Paris and Milan; and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Working with photographic media and their histories, Liz Deschenes reconfigures the various relationships among image, viewer, apparatus, and architecture, often inverting their respective positions. Presented in conjunction with the George Eastman Museum’s 75th anniversary, Deschenes presents new works that 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. With this exhibition, the artist explains, “Moving images become still objects, and still objects become moving images.”
At the heart of the exhibition is a new installation of large-scale photograms that contends with the variability of frame rates in the silent film era. Other works 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.
Through her practice, Deschenes deconstructs conventional photographic and cinematic systems with a mixture of devotion and irreverence. None of the works on view were made with a camera. The presentation proposes a novel encounter between visitors’ embodied experiences and image-making processes, offering alternative ways of looking and thinking.
Curated by Phil Taylor, Department of Photography.
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.
In Conversation (April 2, 2025)
With her exhibition Frames per Second (Silent) as a focus, Liz Deschenes had a conversation with Eastman Museum curator Phil Taylor. The discussion included the development of the exhibition, the threads of Deschenes's practice that it brings together, and how the artist conceives of her ongoing investigations of the histories of photography and film.
