as if I'd lived and forgotten it

"The films — Cicatrix, Midwaste, A list of things that make the heart beat faster, Even god, and COLORADO — span three decades and three formats: 16mm, VHS, and digital video. The two early works, Cicatrix and A list, still feel future facing to me, even though they are old. The three films that are more recent, Midwaste, Even god, and COLORADO are like waves of aftermath. They are reckonings with the possibility of repair and resolving the past—personal, familial, structural. All five works either reference each other or hold the first images of friends who reappear in later works. For the last few years I’ve kept thinking and saying: time doesn’t pass, it accumulates." —Liz Roberts

Introduction by Matt McKinzie:

"Tonight, we plumb the depths of Liz’s output as a moving image artist, spanning numerous decades and formats — from the 1990s through the 2020s, across 16mm, video, and digital. We also celebrate Liz’s role as one of the leading lights of our avant-garde film community. The cross-organizational collaboration happening tonight is a testament to the many lives Liz has touched with her work and her friendship.

A few years ago, Liz and I were both programmed at MIX. The festival that year was full of great work, but one film in particular left an impression on me that I still can’t shake — it burrowed under my skin and shifted something in me on a molecular level. It was Liz’s film EVEN GOD, which screens in tonight’s program. Many artists document their own lives, but no one documents their own life, the lives of their loved ones, and the spaces they inhabit like Liz. With EVEN GOD, Liz pieces together VHS footage from her past, shot during a time she was living in a house with several of her friends and together making art and using drugs. Liz contemplates the possibility of licensing this footage for a prospective film deal that ultimately doesn’t pan out. In posing the question, “who owns a memory and what is its value?,” Liz allows us to peer into the deepest, most intimate parts of herself and her past. In doing so, she crafts a diaristic work that eschews sentimentality, straightforward confessionalism, and easy categorization. She dismantles her narrative’s potential for commodification by foregrounding sequences that other, more commercially-minded filmmakers might have left on the cutting room floor: the quietude, the quotidian conversations, the direct-to-camera streams-of-consciousness; a roommate puking, heard but not seen; a cloudy bucket of bathwater; two friends locked in a ceaseless stare. The poetry of these sequences, of course, reveal more about Liz’s experience and the dynamics of her relationships during this time in her life than any direct narrative could.

Liz’s work embraces irresolution, temporality, nonlinearity and liminality in pursuit of a deeper truth. In her film MIDWASTE, she notes: “It occurs to me that this is not a memoir. It is more of a field report, from that zone of impasse where you can’t live with it and can’t live without it.” As much as Liz’s films reveal, they also give back. Her voiceover early in the same film notes that her friend told her: “Yes, you can make a film about me, but you have to stay my friend afterward. I agreed.” This reciprocal exchange epitomizes Liz’s practice, wherein her camaraderie continues after the camera stops rolling. Her films excavate deeper revelations in the pursuit of deeper real-life connections. Ultimately, she transmutes hardship into healing and shows us how honesty and introspection in one’s art can also be acts of care and community-building.

These films, shown together and interwoven by shared fragments of footage, are a testament to this fact in that they include many of the same people from different passages throughout Liz’s life. While preparing for this program and speaking with various colleagues and collaborators, I can’t tell you the number of times people referred to Liz as a key mentor. When Liz and I first connected over social media about this program, Liz mentioned that Leighton Peirce (who I’d been programmed with at a film festival in the spring) was her former professor and a major influence on her; the person who believed in her and encouraged her to make films. Liz has no doubt had this same impact on so many people in this room tonight. This is a long overdue celebration of an artist who has influenced and empowered so many of us to make work, to grapple with our trauma in our art, to embrace not just the simultaneity but the inextricability of our pleasure and our pain, and ultimately, to reclaim our own narratives."

Program:

1. Cicatrix (1995, B&W, sound, 10 minutes)
2. A list of things that make the heart beat faster (1996, color and B&W, sound, 11 minutes)
3. Midwaste (2021, color, sound, 23 minutes)
4. Even god (2024, color, sound, 12 minutes)
5. COLORADO (2026, B&W, sound, 13 minutes)

TRT: 69 minutes.