Lisa Kereszi

Lives and works in New Haven, CT, USA

Artist statement

My work shared here has circled around a series that investigates those places people are driven to in search of escape from our realities, entitled Fun and Games. In the process of trying to understand what drives us to want to lose ourselves, from roughly 1998-2006, at the turn of the last century, I sought out public, sometimes transient spaces like nightclubs, strip clubs, haunted houses, motels, movie theatres and the like. I photographed them with available light as long exposures in order to make them feel less familiar and more still, and almost always during the day, when sunlight could peek in cracks and crevices, or the florescent room lights could be switched on, thus illuminating the stages and sets far more than they were ever intended to be lit in practice. My experiences as a child growing up in a family affected by addiction and depression are what ignited this work about escapism. Not only did I want to understand what might drive a person to escape the world via drugs, alcohol or suicide, but I also desperately wanted to get away myself from what I thought must tragically be my birthright. I hoped to put on view the complicated nature of our psychologies, while seeking transformative moments in which a banal detail could become a redemptive, poetic thing. From 2007-2013, I made a continuation of that larger ongoing project with The Party’s Over, veering even more towards the daylight in an effort to see with more clarity the complicated and false world...

Artwork