October 2013

OUT OF CONFINEMENT: Soundings from the Inland Sea

Growing up in the vast flat spaces of the Midwest triggered my obsession for the infinite space of the horizontal horizon. Now confined to the urban space of Washington DC, my world is peculiarly claustrophobic. As an artist, my response is to leave my world of filmmaking to work in a medium that allows my physical self to be in the space I create.

Sound tracks enhance horizontal, inked landscape scrolls, together evoking the spaces of the tall grass prairies of America’s Inland Sea, and the conversation between culture, digital media and the industrial landscape.

Variations in space, scale and horizon invite the viewer to enter into the narrative at any point, and travel through the work via self-directed investigation of place. Irony and humor are important (both audio and visual). Our aesthetic pleasure is perpetually modulated by doses of discomfort, the visually vile and ignoble. Vast spaces are peppered with steel mills, advertisements, and gambling casinos over which soar the Great Blue Heron or a steel suspension bridge—all of it rich with a heady and erotic banquet of sound and light.

My scrolls ask how hearing and listening fit together with seeing and looking. Can the sea of culture high and low, the glorious and the hideous, occupy without privilege, a shared space? Can the viewer negotiate a personal experience within the work independently of the artist’s apparent (or not) intention?

Litten has an MA in Art History and is a filmmaker and photographer. She is a former Professor of Television and Popular Culture at Columbia College in Chicago. In 2008, she moved to Washington, DC where she began to experiment with a low-tech narrative form of horizontal inked landscapes accompanied by sound compositions.

Visit her website at www.lauralitten.com.