This series plays on the digital disconnect. Painting, like other art forms still has a story to tell, but sometimes that story is lost behind the screen. The advancement of technology is two sided. Technology is a powerful tool for sharing knowledge, but it is also a crutch, changing the way we view and retain information. In "digital sketch" I am trying to find balance with how I interact with this medium. These digital collages were created through the appropriation of images found on stock photography sites. Photo transfers onto wood were made with stretched canvas borders. Now there are two realities.

Fig. 01
The circle has been utilized throughout history to convey unity, wholeness, and infinity. This perfect form or "sacred" geometric shape has played a major role in religious architecture and iconography. It is the ideal state of creation; it is a cycle. The application of such a perfect form provides a sense of completion. It represents something or nothing at all.

My work is about small discoveries within a process of rebuilding. I begin by painting circles on raw canvas. The canvas becomes both surface and a point of interest. I begin to think about each element in a painting. Suddenly my paintings become sculptural, tactile and inviting. I make work that is completely formed out of my discarded material. I think about unraveling and I begin to weave. Weaving holds everything together, creates a connection. Like the circle, the weavings become continuous. I am back at the beginning, but now I have found the center.

A symbiotic community of pixels and textiles analogous to that of bacterial cultures. With a combination of digital and physical paintings printed on fabric, I question the gendered binary of hand-work and fine art, while exploring the way art is reproduced and viewed in this new age of clicks and scrolls.

Through the interplay of process and material, both machine-made and organic, these abstracted forms investigate the ways that sex and eating intersect as visceral, sensual, life-sustaining forces. Food and its relationship to our bodies roots us within our environment and constitutes a lens through which to reconsider the relations between sex, gender, and power.

Installation from my month long residency at the Vermont Studio Center

Solo Show at Terrault Contemporary

Controlled Rot is a study into relationships between cultural systems – visible, invisible, and imagined – that connect and sustain us. These works employ imagery of food bacteria and their shapes, forms, colors and connections to query into human understandings of and relationships to our bodies and environments. Through the pervasive use of antibiotics and antiseptics, modern society champions the containment and eradication of these invisible bacteria cultures, and thereby the destruction of our own microbiomes, the internal landscapes that give definition to our existence. Through the unexpected partnering of materials and processes, including paint, digitally printed and naturally-dyed fabrics, ceramic, quilting, video and kombucha fiber, Liss creates a visual and visceral symbiosis that challenges the binaries her work addresses – craft versus fine art, traditional versus digital, female versus male – and seeks to establish curiosity and relationship in the liminal space between these dichotomies.

Nordic Food Lab Installation

These sculptures were born from discarded materials: vegetable scraps, sauerkraut, kombucha mothers. Even within the Nordic Food Lab, an organization that champions the latent possibilities of the unwanted we continue to accrue waste. But here lies more beauty—within this detritus, other types of inedible yet aesthetic elements emerge. Texture, color, form are still richly present. The building blocks of sculptural installations reached out to me. I wanted to create work that spoke of these things: the interactions across disciplines, the hive mind working towards unknown goals, the nuances of the individual braided into a larger textile.

I dehydrated and saved it all. I created pieces like stained glass from ombré-hued kombucha mothers of rhubarb, cascara, elderflower. I laminated the dehydrated membranes then pieced them into a quilt. The fibers pushed tightly against the plastic-like embossed prints. I built a frame from scrap wood found behind a container city. Thinking about soft sculpture and the discourse between a range of materials I added felt corners and hung the frame with bright red thread. Gentle reminders that this space is not just a ‘lab’. Yes, we were once on a houseboat, but this textile piece speaks to the wunderkammer, the cabinet of curiosities that its inhabitants are creating. From meat curing in wax, to jars of insects and dehydrated frogs—there is nothing sterile about this place.

Inspired by conversations about phylogenetic diagrams, recursive cycles, and the constraints of language, I made a mobile. I used dehydrated food waste, the weighted ornaments ranging in size and color. Tomato pulp in cadmium red, creamy sauerkraut, plum and sencha greens, a spinning galaxy of vegetable paper.

Building these sculptures brought up questions about the importance of aesthetics when it comes to the complete sensory experience. The non-edible aspects of a space, a dish, or any experience not only inflect the edible but also form it. Our connection to food goes beyond taste and aroma. The senses are heightened or diminished by the visual, olfactory, and tactile. With multi-sensory perception in mind, I created an event around kombucha mother projections, curated sounds, and a variety of kombucha cocktails, sorbets, and gelatins. This culminating party allowed me to show my colleagues and friends what I had been working on over the previous three months, and the relationships between my work on kombucha mothers and the installations for the lab space. It brought together a mix of people from across the city, each bringing something unique into that vibrant night in our courtyard, lit with projected visuals, filled with dulcet sounds and the chatter of friends and strangers, and warmed with a reminder to soak it in and enjoy the surprises of the edible.