We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Liv Dawson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Liv below.

Hi Liv, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I think the most meaningful project I’ve worked on thus far has been a short film I completed during my MFA at Pratt Institute.

As a child, my father discouraged us from viewing our family archive in order to preserve our memories of actual events like birthdays, holidays, and family time. We had a few photos around the home, and of course when I was thirteen I got social media and began creating my own archive, but from infancy to pre-teenage years I didn’t really look at images of myself. My father had this theory from his own experience that he would see an image from his childhood, and then every time after that he would remember himself in the image, and less from the first-person perspective of the actual memory. He wanted to give his children the opportunity to remember the first person view of our memories, and then later in life be given the chance to see the outside perspective.

In graduate school, he gifted me the entirety of our family archive. I decided to do a short film titled “It’s All Coming Back To Me” on what it was like to view that for the first time, and interview him on how photos and memory overlap for him. It was so meaningful to get to do a close project with him, and it really cemented my practice of involving my family so closely in my art-making process. It was also so trippy and wonderful to see all these videos and photos from my childhood that I had never seen before, and to be able to turn them into an artwork.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I think the most obvious thing about me and my work is that it’s so rooted in my childhood and upbringing here in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Park Slope, and my father grew up in Flatbush, and his family grew up in Midwood, and on and on back over a hundred years. Sometimes it feels like Brooklyn is another family member we all have. In my current work I’ve been building miniatures and models of Brooklyn streets, brownstone buildings, and interiors of apartments I’ve lived in all from memory. I make them out of non-corrugated cardboard (which was also invented in Brooklyn!) and photograph them, create video installations within them, and use them as a play-world in which my art exists.

I started my photography practice in undergrad at Goucher College, with the amazing professor Laura Burns who really pushed me to see photography not just as photos on a wall, but all the ways images can be experienced. I focused mostly on installation, and using images to create an experiential installation with light and color, and then once I began my MFA at Pratt I started to understand how sculpture and installations can be used as sets and props for images and video.

I spent time between undergrad and grad school working in corporate advertising sales, so I often joke that I’m a “normie” artist who loves emails and spreadsheets, but I think it really helped me with organization and project management to now put on giant world-building installations.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think the main goal I have with my creative practice and artwork is understanding where I come from, and why I am the way that I am. Most of the art I make comes from this exploration of self, and is always made with myself as the audience first. I don’t ever really think “where will this end up?” or “how will people respond to this?” because then I’ll get embarrassed, or stop myself from going to deep or intimate. I sort of use a “dance-like-nobody-is-watching” approach to making, and then if I feel like it’s important enough to me that it needs to be shared, I do so. It’s really important to me to use art as a way of connecting with my family, and with the hope that people will relate to it, but if they don’t that’s okay too, because at the end of the day, I was just making things to understand myself and my loved ones better. I think the main mission is always be vulnerable, be honest, and be kind.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I think the most rewarding aspect is being able to connect with the people I love on a really intimate level when I work with them in my art. I’m currently working on a lifelong project with my younger sister, where every four years I photograph her. It’s a really insane feeling to both see her grow through the lens of the camera, and also to be seen by her as my full self and an artist. Every time we do this project and sit down to take pictures, she is the age I was the last time we did it (we’re four years apart), and it’s a really beautiful experience to make images of her that also help me better understand sisterhood and what it means to love and be loved. I think having that ability to take images that fully represent who she is at this current moment while also reflecting where I am behind the camera is such a rewarding and wonderful job. And it feels so lucky to say my job is making photos and videos of the people I love!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://livdawsonstudios.com/work
• Instagram: @ld.pdf