Liz Magic Laser was born, lives and works in New York City. A graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program, Laser has been a resident at the LMCC Workspace Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture program. She had her first New York City solo show, chase, at Derek Eller Gallery in 2010. Her work has been shown at the Prague Biennale 4 (Czech Republic), Artisterium 2009 (Tbilisi, Georgia) and Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1 where her performance, Flight, recently debuted. Laser is currently developing Flight as a public art project in Times Square for May, 2011, with support from Franklin Furnace and the Times Square Alliance. She is also creating a project for the Performa Biennial, 2011.

My performance and video projects interrogate the cultural conventions that structure the relationship between subjectivity and power. Intervening in semi-public spaces such as hospitals, banks, and subway cars, these works have involved collaborations with actors, dancers, surgeons, and motorcycle gang members.

For chase (2009-2010), I staged Bertolt Brecht’s play Man equals Man (1926) in the ATM vestibules of banks throughout New York City. In this production, I collaborated with nine actors individually. They were each instructed to deliver their lines to the bank’s ATM machines and to its unsuspecting patrons. I subsequently edited the scenes according to the text of Brecht’s play to recreate its original narrative.