Laura Kraning’s uncanny moving image work combines richly detailed imagery and sound to transform unseen places into liminal landscapes of the imagination. Plays of light and movement specific to each location summon what is absent in the visible—the past that continues to haunt the present. Kraning takes us to the last Los Angeles drive-in (Vineland, 2009, 10 min.), a flood-control dam with a fire-scarred history (Devil’s Gate, 2011, 20 min.), a boatyard of bygone dramas (Port Noir, 2014, 11 min.), a mirrored field of watchful machines (Irradiant Field, 2016, 10 min.) and, finally, an otherworldly landscape distilled from a mass of archival images (Meridian Plain, 2016, 18 min.). Her work has previously screened at the New York, Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, Rotterdam and Visions du Réel festivals, among other venues.
In person: Laura Kraning
“Esoteric archeology.”— Visions du Réel “A spectral quality characterizes all the images and sounds." – Millennium Film Journal
About the ArtistLaura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Kraning’s work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde and Projections, Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Rencontres Internationales, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, the Leon Speakers Award and Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Film House Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival. Kraning currently resides in Los Angeles where she teaches in the Program in Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts.
https://www.redcat.org/event/laura-kraning-spectral-landscapes