Heat Loss, presented in If I Had a Hammer, FotoFest Biennial, Houston, TX, 2022
Heat Loss, presented in If I Had a Hammer, FotoFest Biennial, Houston, TX, 2022
Heat Loss brings together three videos, a series of seven aluminum prints, and an advertising stand displaying a vinyl print of a chair bearing the impression of a hand. Images and sounds that carry commercial, political, and emotional charge are placed in proximity, their intended meanings loosened by the collision. The three videos, Turn Your Face Toward the Sun, First Freedom, and Zoom Test, each occupy a different register- optimism as instruction, freedom as spectacle, presence mediated through a screen. The aluminum prints circulate found photographic images at the scale and finish of commercial display. The advertising stand offers a chair that holds the shape of a body no longer there.
“The complex, finely calibrated messages of If I Had a Hammer provoke difficult questions about what art can actually do for society beyond illustration. Against the edifice of power and corruption, would an artwork alter the course of history? Would a biennial change the mind of a staunch partisan? Amid the noise of political anxiety, Liz Rodda’s cryptic piece Turn Your Face Toward the Sun, assembled from found video and audio, offers a critique of willful optimism. As a camera pans across magazine images of stilettos, parquet floors, handsome furniture, and well-placed art books, a young woman whispers what she calls “positives affirmations.” The sound is muffled, yet the clichés resound as commands. “Move on, it’s just a chapter in the past,” she says. “Don’t close the book, just turn the page.”
— Brendan Embser, Senior Editor, Aperture
Curated by Max Fields, Director, Visual Arts Center at UT Austin