Biography
Neil Berkowitz is a visual and new media artist in Seattle. He resumed a long dormant fine art photography practice in 2017 and since that time has steadily been expanding the media he employs. Neil’s work is frequently driven by concerns with how ideology and culture create habits of influenced self-censorship of what is in plain, daily sight, with questions of the nature of personal and place identity, with notions of the foreign, and with the madeness of our physical and conceptual worlds.
His expansion of media has recently been rewarded by his appointment to the 2026-2029 Washington State Public Artists Roster (pre-approved for indoor projects with budgets $50k - 1025k) and his selection as alternate for a Jack Straw Foundation New Media Residency and Exhibition for a sound-based interactive space. Additional accomplishments include a three work commission for the new Othello branch of the Seattle Children's Odessa Brown Children's Clinic in Seattle, inclusion in the City of Seattle's traveling collection, and participation in more than 50 solo, group, and juried exhibitions.
Neil's arts education includes the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, followed by studio arts coursework at the New School in the early 1970s, and more recently as a nonmatriculated student at North Seattle College and then in the Digital Arts and Experimental Media Department at the University of Washington. Neil held a Graduate Council Fellowship in the Ph.D. program in English at SUNY at Stony Brook and still occasionally writes criticism, essays, and poetry.
Statement
Art’s best expectations can be best realized when people can engage with it without burdens of specialness overpowering the encounter—no matter how special the art may indeed be. For that reason, I have spent several years broadening my media from its lens-based core, seeking presentations that increase the possibilities for engagement. This has opened new, active paths toward interactive installations, time-based art, and public art, each making frequent use of my two dimensional work. For the continuing portion of my two dimensional lens-based work on paper this has resulted in showing more and more work unframed and unmounted.
I have never been truly satisfied with the results. Removing the physical frame did not remove the hard-edged separation of the image from the space of the encounter. Nor did it alter its essence as a fixed and anchored thing. Only recently have I begun to explore the approach in the current work you see: mount the photographic paper onto larger and varied papers. For instance, when mounted onto one handmade Thai mulberry paper this work hangs as if floating against or dancing with the wall. Its random string patterns, irregular and flowing edges, and fringes reach out into the space rather than being confining it to a frame. As I move forward I will explore ways to make two dimensional images gain some of the freedom that the base paper exhibits and to incorporate more additional media into the work.
Much of my work seeks to expose the curation not only of art but of our physical and conceptual worlds, It takes as a foundation that a powerful, pervasive, and yet unacknowledged curation is a broad societal imperative. This curation is ongoing rather than discrete, an aggregation rather than a formally organized activity. For these—and other—reasons my work frequently prompts its viewers to question casual observation and to consider how our perception is both shaped by and shapes the madeness of our physical and conceptual realms.
I balk at calling my multilayered work altered or manipulated. Like other art it is intentional—and I want it to at least whisper that it was made and thus requires questioning and interpretation—and that it is up to viewers to weigh its meaning, its reliability, and how it connects with their own lives.