Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American filmmaker and media artist based in San Francisco and New York. Lesson’s practice spans more than forty years, throughout which she has investigated themes such as the relationship between humans and technology, identity, privacy and surveillance and the role of the media in the political landscape. From early in her career Leeson eschewed the traditional confines of painting and sculpture for performance and installation art in the 1960s and 1970s. The prescience of Leeson’s thematic concerns extends into her use of technology, which has been central to the artist’s work since the 1980s. Leeson frequently makes interactive work and has consistently engaged with burgeoning technologies as they emerge. Leeson was among the first artists to use then new LaserDiscs (for Lorna, 1979-82), touchscreen technology (in Deep Contact, 1984) and she has recently incorporated artificial intelligence into her work (Life Squared, 2005). Leeson has also made four feature films since 1997, one of which (!Women Art Revolution) has been praised as an essential documentary on the feminist art movement. Leeson’s work has experienced a surge in public attention in the last numbers of years since a retrospective in Germany in 2014, which has seen her pioneering work with technology and her role as a female artist retroactively included in art historical accounts of the twentieth and twenty first century. Leeson exhibited her video installation America’s Finest (1991-95) at The Kitchen in 1999. This premiered alongside screenings of other film and video works by the artist as part of The Kitchen’s TV Dinner series at an event that reflected on thirty years of Leeson’s groundbreaking work.