Liz Magic Laser, Resident Artist Lecture 2025

Liz Magic Laser gives a lecture at Skowhegan speaking about her performance and video work. Laser speaks about how she approaches her role as someone who not just works as an artist but also as a journalist and researcher. Some of the themes Laser addresses include representations of emotion, neediness, aggression, hysteria, vulnerability, loss of identity, the representations of excessive emotionality, and brainwashing. Much of Laser’s work starts out by selecting an institutional or quasi-public site like the bank, a prison, a hospital, or museums, where behaviour is shaped by regulated spatial quotes. Laser tries looking for a text or scenario that will produce a kind of generative fiction with the place, and tries to introduce scripted material or misbehaviour that is about making views visible by crossing their boundaries. Laser speaks about her interest in how politicians appropriate modes of the confessional from reality tv and how they stage these kinds of emotional ruptures as a tool of public persuasion through acting techniques that are used and misused to secure political power. Laser’s work continues to trace how these tools from psychotherapy and spirituality are appropriated and used to regulate and optimize public behaviour and employees behaviours and working methods. Laser in particular addresses her observations in noting how reality television producers psychologically manipulate and cajole people into doing things that conflate their personal traumas with political affiliations. Laser sees the appropriation of new age thinking, compulsive workaholism, and the use and abuse of therapy as another important conceptual focus of her work. Laser also sees psychology as a questionable and creative area of inquiry that is used to manipulate people. Laser is interested in interviews with consumers in order to fine tune one’s output and advertising to maximum effect such as the scrolling on our phones which was based on slot machines. These are the kinds of intimate details that Laser gets really excited about: exploring aesthetics, arts, and performing arts that are used to control and dominate us in different ways.