lisa huffaker
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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Lisa Huffaker is a poet, musician, and visual artist. Her poems have been published in Southwest Review, Poet Lore, Measure, Able Muse, Southern Poetry Review, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Southern Humanities Review. Her micro-publishing project, White Rock Zine Machine, offers tiny books of art and writing through sculptural vending machines. A classical singer by training, she sings with the Dallas Opera. She presents art-inspired writing projects at the Nasher Sculpture Center, and recently served as a Visiting Artist at the Dallas Museum of Art, where her installation, Sound/re:Vision, invited visitors to interact with a music box Zine Machine, compose their own chance music, and create zines inspired by a playlist ranging from opera to gamelan. Her latest project is an installation called Code Room at Ro2 Art, where she has transformed a space under the stairs with asemic symbols and eyes suspended in magnifying lenses. A single person may enter, sit in a chair, and operate a vending machine almost as an oracle, to receive zines exploring "code."
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ARTIST STATEMENT
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These four assemblages meditate on the mystery inherent in a photograph: what does it mean that we can gaze indefinitely at the image of a real person frozen in time, who does not gaze back? To what extent, if any, can we partake of subject’s inner life? The objects and materials surrounding these photographs imagine and magnify the inaccessible subjectivity of the women pictured. Their thinking, which we can only guess at, is coded into asemic non-language, which cannot be read, no matter how diligently the eye and mind pull at the glyphs. Lenses bring the images closer, and also stand as a barrier. As I aligned the objects comprising these assemblages into compositions, I imagined each of them as a sort of looking-machine, whose purpose was not to delve into the mystery of the photographs, but to hover at the brink – not to know, but to wonder.
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