Lynn Hershman Leeson - Work

Work

Leeson's work has as its themes: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Her work grew out of an installation art and performance tradition. She explored interactivity with her video work.

LORNA was an early project of Leeson. The first interactive laser artdisk, LORNA tells the story of an Agoraphobic woman. Viewers have the option of directing her life into several possible plots and endings. LORNA never left her one room apartment. According to Leeson, the objects in her room were very much like those in The Dante Hotel. Except that there was a television set. As LORNA watched the news and ads, she became fearful, afraid to leave her tiny room. Viewers were invited to liberate LORNA from her web of fears by accessing buttons on their remote control unit that corresponded to numbers placed on the items in her room. Instead of being passive, the action was literally in their own hands. Every object in LORNA'S room contains a number and becomes a chapter in her life that opens into branching sequences.

The viewer/participant accesses information about LORNA'S past, future and personal conflicts via these objects. Many images on the screen are of the remote control device LORNA uses to change television channels. Because viewer/participants also use a nearly identical unit to direct the disc action, a metaphoric link or point of identification is established and surrogate decisions are made for LORNA. The telephone was LORNA'S link to the outside world. imageViewer/participants chose to voyeuristically overhear conversations of different contexts as they trespassed the cyberspace of her hard pressed life. There were three endings: Lorna shoots her television set, commits suicide, or moves to Los Angeles.

The plot has multiple variations that can be seen backwards, forwards, at increased or decreased speeds, and from several points of view. There is no hierarchy in the ordering of decisions. And the icons were made often of cut off and dislocated body parts such as a mouth, or an eye...

In 2007 a retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, Autonomous Agents, featured a comprehensive range of the artist's work - from the Roberta Breitmore series (1974–78) to videos from the 1980s and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. Her influential early ventures into performance and photography are also featured in the current touring exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, was published by The University of California Press in 2005 on the occasion of another retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle.

Work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the William Lehmbruck Museum, the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the private collections of Donald Hess and Arturo Schwarz, among many others. Commissions include projects for the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, Daniel Langlois and Stanford University, and Charles Schwab.

Her three feature films - Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada - have been part of the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others, and have won numerous awards. She is presently in the editing phase of a feature-length documentary entitled !Women Art Revolution! A (Formerly) Secret History, which is anticipated for release in 2011.