| I am interested in exploring the nuclear-powered sublime on a firsthand basis. Over the past several years, this interest has provoked excursions to malignant locations like the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, former East German Atomic Bunkers, and the Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Launch Site in the Arctic Circle. In addition to these specifically charged spaces, I have spent countless hours gazing at empty lots, waiting in fast food drive-thru lines, and observing the world from various vehicles at high speeds and altitudes. Within these approximate figure/ground relationships I imagine assortments of devastation while attempting to remain in contact with the logical and illogical elements of a catastrophic event. |  |
Lisi Raskin is a Brooklyn-based artist.
I am interested in exploring the nuclear-powered sublime on a firsthand basis. Over the past several years, this interest has provoked excursions to malignant locations like the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, former East German Atomic Bunkers, and the Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Launch Site in the Arctic Circle. In addition to these specifically charged spaces, I have spent countless hours gazing at empty lots, waiting in fast food drive-thru lines, and observing the world from various vehicles at high speeds and altitudes. Within these approximate figure/ground relationships I imagine assortments of devastation while attempting to remain in contact with the logical and illogical elements of a catastrophic event.
This part of my practice has informed the making of drawings, objects, videos, and large, constructed environments that simultaneously quell and stimulate my fear of technological progress and pathology. Within the framework of large, constructed environments, I create phenomena that torque the logic of the hermetically sealed spaces, where atomic energy is created and consumed. These phenomena or disruptions, which have now permutated every aspect of my artistic practice, are largely indebted to discoveries I have made during an ongoing series of autonomous drawings. While making these drawings, I discovered that a palette of materials like crayons, colored pencils, and construction paper that referenced my childhood artistic endeavors could create a paradigm shift through which I was able to summon notions of science, interrogate them, and strip away the rhetoric that permits the obfuscation of their inherent threat.
In terms of praxis, this fear-based psychic space has opened up certain correlations between art and science. These correlations are the ones that I subconsciously conjure and willfully sublimate through artistic means that hover near a place where the technological and magical coexist, for example, in the act of mashing glue into the pores of colored paper leaving my fingerprints in the dried residue as a record of my own existence. In these moments, my gaze is fixed on a place where the subjective and the objective become blurred and interconnected, a destination I travel toward without understanding the road maps and without heeding cautionary advice. I am most interested in exploring this paradoxical psychic state through the physical use and transformation of materials in my work, but sometimes this transformation is aided and abetted by the formation of fictional characters and invented narratives.
