Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce the New York showing of Trap Door, a film installation by Liisa Roberts originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford for the exhibition Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art.
Trap Door is a film installation composed of four 16 mm silent film projections displayed on four freestanding screens usng front and rear-screen projection. While three of the screens are arranged in a triangular configuration, the fourth is a cinemascope-sized screen facing one side of the triangle. The interrelated images and words projected on the screen construct a virtual space for the viewer’s experience of the piece. A trap door is an artifact that, partially hidden of disguised in the architecture of room, secretly communicates that space with another. A trap door simultaneously belongs to the space of a room and contradicts it; it can be partially hidden or clearly visible depending on whose eyes see it.
Liisa Roberts’ Trap Door belongs to this family of artifacts: using the photographic medium of film, Trap Door defines a carefully constructed space which is fundamentally unstable. Liisa Roberts’ work is concerned with the structure of images and the way in which they define our experience. Her work focuses both on the perception of the viewer and the on the material aspects of that produce the image. Trap Door is a complex reflection of on the specificity of the medium of film, the characteristics of the space in which it is shown and on the interconnection between time and space that determines our perception of the piece.
Liisa Roberts studied sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, London. The Rhode Island School of Design, and The Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.