Lynn hershman leeson biography channel
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The questions it raised about the ungraspable, fluid state of identity, about ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’, the difficulty to often draw the line between fact and fiction, biography and autobiography, the impossibility – perhaps – of entirely achieving that ancient Greek dictum of ‘knowing thyself’, the question of how appearances deceive, and the fundamental constructedness of identity remain; perhaps now stronger than ever given the advent of the internet and the emergence of virtual identities; and of course the increased importance attached to image and self-styling in our ‘lifestyle’ conscious culture of appearances.”
–Katerina Gregos, October 2011
In 1973, Hershman Leeson began a private performance as the fictional character, Roberta Breitmore.
cat. In 1995, the NGC also mounted a major retrospective, Lynn Hershman: Virtuellement Vôtre, (4)where seven other titles were shown, including Virtual Love(1993), a coproduction with German television, and Shooting Script(1992), a coproduction with the Danish Film Workshop.
In 1979, Hershman began creating one of the first interactive videodisk artworks.
SIGGRAPH honored her life’s work with the »Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art« in 2009, followed in 2011 by the »d.velop digital art award« (ddaa), Berlin. Munich (Grin) 2004
Formerly holding a chair at the film department, she is currently »Distinguished Artist« at the New School for Public Engagement in New York. She has worked with a range of different media throughout her entire creative career: photography, video, electronic environments, software and Net Art, such as »Agent Ruby« (1999–2002), as well as in film and performances.
In previous works of Hershman, her characters were named Lorna, Roberta, Marion or Chystene, but each female character looked the viewer directly in the eye and validated her credibility. In that period, her artistic work was sculptural, consisting mainly of wax figures. She lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Part of Hershman's master's thesis involved writing art criticism under three pseudonyms: Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode and Gay Abandon.
Kunsthalle Bremen, June 2–August 16, 2012.
It wasn't until the late 1970s that Hershman started to work in the video medium, which she would then use to further her exploration of similar problematics and themes: the relationship of identity with social and cultural structures as well as with the media environment; the powerlessness of the female subject in these contexts; and the process by which personal power can emerge, using criticism as well as the media.
Finally, a commission from the Seattle Art Museum allowed her to create Paranoid Mirror(1995-1996). In 2005, the University of California Press released Secret Agent, Private I, The Art and Film of Lynn Hershman Leeson. With the addition of a little bureaucratic validation (driver's licence, credit cards, address and bank account, psychological profile, etc.), the fictional character became practically real, spilling over from fiction into reality.
Here Hershman was interested in the multiple strata of life contained by a place or site in a given socioeconomic environment.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
“Nearly forty years on, the importance of The Roberta Breitmore Series cannot be over-estimated. Here, Hershman takes up a further theme pertaining to the human being as a species in general, namely, cloning.
In these interactive works, Hershman is less interested in the construction of female persona in a media society than in how the spectator's gaze is enmeshed in such constructions through mechanisms that the artist uses and puts in place to reveal these very regimes and forms of the gaze.