Liz Huston: Magic, Myth, and Memory

Liz Huston: Magic, Myth, and Memory by Aline SmithsonDecember 29, 2015

©Liz Huston, Dreamkeepers

Living in Los Angeles, I have had the good fortune to witness the creative harvest of Liz Huston. She is a skilled photographer, artist, book designer, creator of magic, business woman and mother, and each of these skills is exacted with grace and intention. In 2008, Liz began creating constructed images as a way express her life, using vintage photographs and imagery collected as “firewood” to become realized as singular stories. Each digital assemblage or photomontage uses the past to contemplate the future and creates inner landscapes that speak to imaginative possibility.

Liz Huston of Venice, California, taught herself the craft of photography more than 18 years ago. She has been a professional photographer nearly as long, shooting commercially as well as showing in the fine art world. Over the years, she has had three books of her photography published, with a fourth currently in the works. Always seeking new ways to express her dreamy inner landscape, Liz grew into digital assemblage or photomontage. As she refined her vision and skills with this emerging digital platform, she discovered a deep sense of purpose expressed. It is with photomontage where Liz truly excels; crafting her personal vision into fantastical new scenes using the nostalgia of antique images as a springboard. She regularly exhibits this work in Los Angeles and around the country.

©Liz Huston, A Tangled Tango

I am fascinated with the way memory influences how stories change and evolve over time. This happens not because the facts change, but because the inner orientation of the storyteller has. Their perspective grows, expanding and contracting with experience. The storyteller journeys us deep into the timeless aspects of the human experience; the kingdoms of love and loss, through a myriad of emotions. Through grief, resolve, growth and into the balance of purpose.

©Liz Huston, At the Edge of Longing

The human form, quite often a female form, is the storyteller within my art. She comes to us in the nude, like a baby, with nothing to hide: her full power and breadth still intact. We see her as metaphor, as paradox embodied. She has the power of flight, yet chooses to walk. She has the ability to swim in great depths, yet allows herself to be captured and tamed. She teaches us, she moves through us, and yet, she does not belong to us. She is composed of images from the past and the present, and thus inhabits multiple worlds at once. This time traveler, this storyteller, unites the treads of time– leading us home, bringing us back into ourselves.

It is perhaps, my own longing for “home”, this place I cannot touch, a nostalgic view of the past and the future romanticized, that is the foundation of my art.