Biography

Lisa Young is the Graduate Director for the RISD Photography Department. Her hybrid practice includes installation, book, video, photography and web projects. Young’s work centers around collecting everyday images and objects and investigating the way that the repetitive action of accumulating and organizing can create its own poetics. Young’s exhibition venues include the Cue Art Foundation, The Getty Research Institute, White Columns, Hunter College, Wave Hill and Bard College. Among her commissioned projects are a billboard at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, LA (Clockshop), an artist book project for Cabinet Magazine and a web project developed with the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University.

Young’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Harvard University Art Museums and the Rose Goldsen Archive for New Media Art at Cornell University. Her artist book/print editions have been distributed through Printed Matter, Pace Prints and Art Metropole. Young completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1996.

Academic Research/Areas of Interest

My projects examine the intersection of the pedestrian, the repetitive and the imperfect with the transcendent, the beautiful and the perfect. I am interested in the way that the repetitive action of accumulating and organizing can create its own poetics. I generate ideas by observing and recording the world around me or through working with appropriated images: taking snapshots of everyday events, recording broadcast TV and collecting ephemera.

I take my collections of everyday images (figure skating from prime time TV, fortune cookie fortunes, tickertape parades) and filter them through frameworks that both organize the data and transform it into something new. I enjoy using structures that allow for chance occurrences - creating the possibility for sublime happenings through embracing the flawed and the unexpected. The resulting works read as formal documents, a framing of my consciousness and observation, and as a series of ephemera that reflect the incomplete and transitory qualities of the sublime.

Lisa Young

Assistant Professor
lyoung01@risd.edu
401-454-6122

• MFA, Tufts University
• BFA, The University of Illinois

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