Janis Crystal Lipzin

 

Based in rural Sonoma County since 1987, media artist Janis Crystal Lipzin, has been making art in virtually every form of reproducible media for nearly forty years and has impacted generations of students  at the San Francisco Art Institute where she taught for three decades. Her photography, films, installations, video sculpture, audio, and media performance works have confronted an array of subjects such as pyromania, prehistoric murder, pesticide abuse, reproductive rights, and mortality. In her recent digital films, such as De Luce 2: Architectura, she collaborates with photo-chemistry as a dance partner, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as she blends an enduring interest in nature’s volatile events with a sympathy for film’s tactile response to light. (View an online film excerpt here: http://vimeo.com/91567025). Her ongoing “Starflex Series” of color photo works exploits the “faults” of a 60-year-old plastic camera which provides evidence of a direct yet surreptitious conspiracy between artist, materials, and photo-chemical occurrences. 

 

Her work has been recognized by exhibits and screenings at hundreds of international venues including the 2013 Venice Biennale, Pompidou Museum (Paris), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Museum of Modern Art (NY), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Edinburgh Film Festival, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and by three Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the Bay Area, her work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Di Rosa Foundation. She studied painting at New York University and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Ohio University, Athens; a Masters of Library/Information Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute.