Dr. Lisa Gives A Sh*t

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is an accomplished artist with 2 books, Contested City and a new book, The Cities We Need. Gabrielle makes work about how people connect to their neighborhoods in a communal emotional way by touring and photographing the neighborhood with individuals that live there. Dr. Lisa wants to know haw an artist as accomplished as Gabrielle is hasn’t put the regular amount of navel gazing that most artists put into their work—what connects Gabrielle to these stories made personal by the people that tell them? After much discussion it seems as if Gabrielle is maybe just grounded and fulfilled on her own that she is able to be generous and connect with her neighbors by making them the stars of her art and photographs. Thinking later, after the session, I thought maybe since she got along so well and felt understood by her parents, so perhaps instead of a typical adolescent rebellion to the authority of her parents, her rebellion manifested in reaction, as a professor, to the authority of acad