Bio

Liz Nayadley grew up in the south outside of Atlanta in the town of Marietta, GA. She is a conceptual artist that is heavily influenced by the past, memories and nostalgia. She graduated from The Atlanta College of Art with a B.F.A in Fine Art Photography. She has recently relocated to Eugene, OR.  She has shown in Atlanta, NYC, Los Angeles, Denver, Port Townsend and Scotland. Three books have been published with her work featured on the cover.

Her larger photographic body of work began as a collaborative effort between Liz Nayadley and another artist named Jeremy Spears.  They worked under the name of Spears/Nayadley and began collaborating shortly after they met in college.  Liz continues with this work dealing with memories of childhood and coming of age. The medium of photography is used as a tool to re-shoot and re-crop her family snapshots of growing up in the South. By choosing certain areas of an image she is repositioning herself through the photograph into it’s emotional content. Placing emphasis on what she considers to be the most significant aspects.  After compiling hundreds of images she begins the second process of placing images next to each other to form narratives and create dynamic shapes by interconnecting lines that join image to image. Her earlier installations of re-photographed, heavily lacquered images sometimes employed up to thirty 20×30 inch prints mounted on hand-made wooden panels. She has since scaled down the number of panels per piece but continues to use the same process of varnishing each image.

When photographing she pays close attention to the details of the surface of the images and often shows scratches, pen marks and tears from their neglect over the years. As a result of this presentation the images become precious objects that closely resemble paintings. The placement of the images relies upon how each image connects to one another aesthetically as well as conceptually.  This is where the work transforms from personal into something universal. The idea that something lives outside the frame completes each piece.