A well-rounded artist

The artistic résumé of Portland artist Liz Haley is sort of all over the place. Haley dabbles in a bit of it all—from video and photography to performance and collage. Through all of it she is aiming toward a common theme of exposing how small we humans really are.

Massive events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, economic collapse, heartbreak and death occur around us and all we can do is sit back and watch our fate slowly fall into the hands of the unknown. Haley gravitates towards questions with her work and seeks out the relationships between what we know and don’t know.

One of Haley’s past performance pieces involved hooking up to a lie detector and subjecting herself to uncensored questioning from random participants. Haley wrote, “The exhibition hoped to question the importance and relativity of honesty and truth.”

In 2006 Haley and artist Troy Briggs headed out to the bridges of Portland to ask strangers to take a photo of them. The attempt was to understand the relationships between strangers and the moments that remove this title.

Love is the title of Haley’s 12-minute audio interview where she asked the same question: What is love? to a handful of people ranging from young to old. The “video” is really just a single black and white image of wolves, yet the picture is beautiful enough and the responses poignant and thought provoking to keep you in tune.

Haley’s photographic work is arguably her best endeavor as an artist. Images of faceless bodies, landscapes and loneliness tell a variety of stories. In If you can hear me, squeeze my hand to Beginning the End, the work includes a photo of a red-dressed women lying face down in a field of dandelions. Dead raccoons and punctured bags of beta fish are included in a collection of pieces titled Thoughts vs. Feelings.

A collage project titled Postcards from the Arctic is a fantastically weird display of genius which uses backdrop images from the arctic to create scenes so outrageous and clever you can’t help but feel giddy.

Same Sphere: Never Meeting is the latest of Haley’s work and one of her most thought provoking. Addressing the issue of technology and media, Haley has created landscape images infused with odd hunks of metal and built technology.

Of course, a million questions can be conjured by reflecting on the juxtaposition of the images but they could not be more relevant in today’s world. How does technology influence nature and our own relationships? Is technology distracting us from the beauty right in front of our eyes?

In a town saturated with artists it’s often hard to pinpoint the ones to keep an eye on. Haley is one to follow—her stylistic eye is both hip and beautiful and the depth of intimacy between her thoughts and emotions are stamped all over her work. Same Sphere: Never Meeting is a quality set of work from an artist whose next move we could never predict.