Liz Kuball
Downtown Freeways Mini Storage #7, Liz Kuball, 2006, Archival Pigment Print, 12" x 18", Edition of 20
Featured in Inside/Outside, October 2007.
Bio
Liz Kuball was born in Washington, D.C., during the height of the Watergate era and raised in the same town in Michigan where her parents grew up. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, she studied English and history and dropped out of an introductory photography class after the first week. She holds a master's in English from Butler University and a master's in writing from the University of Southern California. Her photography explores consumerism and its ramifications--what we use and how we use it--and has appeared in A Field Guide to the North American Family, a novella by Garth Risk Hallberg (Mark Batty Publisher, 2007), and the Humble Arts Foundation group show no. 16. Liz was named an Honorable Mention in the Hey, Hot Shot! Summer '07 competition at the Jen Bekman Gallery (New York, NY). She lives and works in Southern California.
In Store statement
Between 1985 and 2007, the square footage of self-storage facilities in the United States grew 740 percent, and driving the freeways of Southern California, this growth is evident. This incredible expansion has been spurred by Americans' accumulation of things, gluttony of the material form. As I drove by storage facilities, I started thinking about what was behind those garage doors and padlocks. It occurred to me that the warehouses weren't full of meaningless "stuff"--they were the repository for all kinds of memories that people weren't willing to part with. Old furniture inherited from the recently deceased. Boxes of old love letters. Books and LPs and photographs. In this ongoing project, I look for the beauty in these places, imagining what's behind closed doors.
