captions to be refinished
Katie Urban
Katie Urban An artist's statement
Captions 1
Continental Drift blends landscape and myth to depict the earth in its primordial state when the forces of nature caused a rift in pangea and the tectonic plates began to shift.
natural phenomena. The soundtrack reflects the mixture of quietude and cataclysm that marked this epoch. An ethereal female voice initiates the rupturing of the supercontinent and moments of dissonance reflect the violent upheaval as the land is stretched and pulled apart.
The piece opens at the moment just before the shift with a still shot of a glacial landscape. The planet begins to heat up and the serenity of the land is disrupted by increasingly powerful
Eventually a stasis is reached and the continental drift comes to a halt. The piece closes with still shots of a flock of birds in the sky. So begins the proliferation of life.
Captions 2
Continental Drift is composed of footage shot at popular tourist locations in Argentina and Iceland such as IguazĂş Falls and the Golden Circle. It transforms these breathtaking yet touristy settings into signifiers of primal power and mysticism. Much of my work explores the interchange between the prosaic and the otherworldly, revealing the emotions, tensions and mysteries that exist beneath the surface of everyday experience. I use mundane objects, settings and situations to create allegories that address
larger questions such as our relationship to the past and the connection between the material and spiritual. I seek to communicate these metaphysical complexities in a way that is visceral and immediate. I use image, atmosphere and metaphor to bypass the rationality of language, tap into our collective unconscious and evoke sensation in the viewer. Through this intuitive approach, I invite the viewer to feel the work directly, thereby experiencing an innate connection to the abstractions I am exploring.
An interview with
Katie Urban How did you come up with the idea for Continental Drift? In 2009, I spent three months traveling in Argentina followed by a three month residency in Iceland. I visited some amazing places- Iguazú Falls, the Patagonia Lakes District, Los Glaciares National Park, the Golden Circle and the volcano Eyjafjallajökull as it was erupting. I shot a lot of video in these places, but only a tourist memorializing my travels. At this point, I wasn’t even working in video. I was making figurative drawings inspired by world mythologies and the writings of Joseph Campbell. I was feeling restless, though. I felt that I had taken that project as far as I could, but wasn’t sure where to go next. In Iceland, I started working in digital media and installation and my practice shifted to something that felt more alive and relevant. Fast forward to 2012… the idea for Continental Drift came to me slowly. I was watching a lot of Kenneth Anger at the time and was taken by the opening shots of Lucifer Rising. It shows an erupting volcano paired with a foreboding soundtrack by Bobby Beausoleil. It then cuts to ancient Egypt and the goddess Isis watching a baby crocodile hatch. I loved how he connected powerful natural phenomena with ancient spirituality and mythology and I started thinking back to my footage of volcanoes, geysers, glaciers and waterfalls. I felt there was potential there, but didn’t have a clear direction yet and so I didn’t pursue it. Over the next few months, I started thinking more and more about that footage and knew I had to figure out what to do with it. Inspiration came when I started thinking about my own travel experiences. In Iceland, I visited a place called Thingvellir, an area where the continental drift is visible. It’s a deep fissure in the rock with Europe on one side and North America on the other. I had a pretty powerful experience there even though it was overrun by tourists. The same goes for the other places I visited. They were all incredible, but too crowded. I remember standing at Iguazú, feeling totally intimidated by the power of the falls and trying to block out all of the other tourists
Katie Urban
some of who were not very respectful of the experience. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be the first person to discover the falls and felt sad that I would never have a truly solitary, introspective experience at any of these sites. Part of making Continental Drift was realizing that fantasy and creating a picture of these places before humans existed. Once I tapped into my own experiences, I had the clarity of vision that I needed to get started. Let's speak about your creative process: you were using older footage for Continental Drift and so didn’t pre-plan any shots or use storyboards. It was only in the editing process that you felt the work beginning to form. This reminds us of Alberto Giacometti's vision of artmaking: the artist does not represent what he sees, but the act of creation is a continuous process of discovering the Self. Do you always work this way? Could you introduce our readers to your particular creative process? I do work this way, even on new material. My process is very intuitive and open. When I start a video project, I have a strong vision of the piece, but no idea what it will actually look like
Captions 3
in the end. This vision is hard to explain - it’s a sense of the overall atmosphere and feeling of the work, but it’s more complex and intangible than saying to myself: “I want this to be scary” or “I want this to feel sad.” It’s pretty non-verbal and in some ways hazy, but it’s complete and I absolutely know what I’m after. This is my guiding light through the whole process. The vision that I had for Continental Drift was one of primal power. I wanted to hint at the presence of a creative force beyond human morality and the feelings of fear that are evoked when one is faced with the omnipotent. I also wanted to capture a sense of the unknown and mysterious. To get clarity on these feelings, I thought about the awe and overwhelm I felt standing next to that waterfall at Iguazú. I felt small and like I was in the presence of a force that wasn’t necessarily immoral, but was without a human sense of right and wrong. I remember
thinking, ‘This waterfall could destroy me and it wouldn’t care at all.’ That’s a humbling thing. When it comes time to shoot, I don’t use storyboards or pre-plan my shots. I prefer to keep things flexible and follow my instincts, but I do sometimes have ideas beforehand. For instance, the imagery for my video Within Skin was inspired by a series of recurring dreams I was having at the time. I knew that I wanted to use images of hallways, stairs, eels and close ups of skin, so I went out and shot those things. Often, I would see something interesting along the way or one idea would lead to another and I would shoot that as well. I also knew that I wanted Within Skin to feel dream-like and have a very smooth flow. Early on, I had the idea that the video should have “directionality.” By that, I mean that I wanted all of the shots to move in one direction and blend
Captions 4
into one another to create the feeling of it being one continuous shot. I was conscious of this as I was shooting and was sure to get lots of slow pans. I shot for four months before I started edited and even then I kept shooting because I would have new ideas or the piece would need something else. In the end, I amassed a good amount of footage that I had no idea how to put together. It all happened during editing.
of clips. It can completely change the feeling of the work. As with Within Skin, I’m usually shooting new footage at the same time as I’m editing, looking for the right shots to fill in gaps or bring the piece together. Then it’s a matter of refining and adjusting until I have a piece that fulfills my vision. To get there, I rely on intuition. If something doesn’t feel right, I work on it until it does.
For me, the editing process is long and arduous. I start by looking at the footage I have and laying down a very basic skeleton to get a sense of the pacing and trajectory. From there I re-arrange the clips until I start to see my vision take shape. It’s trial and error, taking what I have and seeing how I can piece it together into something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s amazing what a difference seemingly small things can make- trimming or adding half a second here and there, switching the positioning
It usually takes months of tinkering for me to figure out how to make something work. With Continental Drift, the piece just didn’t feel right for a long time and I wasn’t sure what to do to about it. Eventually I started experimenting with split screen mirroring as a way to add visual interest and to reflect the way the earth was split and pulled apart during the continental drift. I also added coinciding bursts of color and noise to evoke an unknown and powerful spiritual presence. Then I went back and fine-tuned
Captions 5
it until it flowed and all the edits were smooth. Honestly, the whole process can be tedious and frustrating, but it’s what works for me. Coming at it in a predetermined way, like rigidly following a script or storyboards, would feel like putting on blinders. I’d have the sense that I was ignoring all the chance occurrences and spontaneous moments of inspiration that fill a piece with life. For me, it needs to grow organically and I need to discover what the piece is, not work off of fixed ideas that may or may not fit anymore. Audio plays a big role in your works. Not by chance, you compose the music for all of your videos. Your use of sound is nondiegetical and tends to sabotage common perception mechanisms. It also conveys a particular and often ambiguous atmosphere, like the stunning mix of quietude and
cataclysm in Continental Drift. Could you introduce our readers to this aspect of your filmmaking? Music is such a powerful way to evoke emotion and establish mood so I knew from the start that sound would be a key element in my work. I felt hesitant to use another artist’s music both for copyright reasons and because I couldn’t find anything that fit perfectly- there was always something a little off that didn’t capture the right atmosphere. When I start editing, I have a general idea of the type of sound I want. Often I’ll define it by thinking about the music of others- like for Continental Drift, I wanted the music to be a cross between Throbbing Gristle’s ambient work and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. At the early stages of editing, I was listening to Throbbing Gristle and that helped me set the
pace of the piece and lay down the general framework. As the video started taking shape and the edits became more fine-tuned, it no longer fit with Throbbing Gristle so I started my own composition. I use freesound.org to find sound clips that I use as building blocks. The way I find sounds is a little random. I’ll search for general words like “ambient”, “buzz” or “wind.” Sometimes I have an idea for the kind of sound I need and will look up words that are more suggestive like “knives” or “flourish” or “oooh” (these are actual terms I’ve searched for). It’s a very inexact science. Sometimes I can use the sounds as is, but often I go into Audacity and manipulate them to better fit my ideas. Then I lay them into GarageBand to create the final composition. Similarly to my editing process, this is also trial and error. I always watch the piece while I’m working on the music to make sure they fit together. Sometimes I need to change the music to fit the video and other times it’s vice versa. When I’m in the process it always feels like chaos and like it’ll never come together, but so far it always has. A recurrent characteristic of many of your artworks is experience as a starting point for artistic production: in your opinion, is experience an absolutely necessary part of the creative process? For me, it is. I process my emotions and experiences through my work, so for me they’re inseparable. It wasn’t always like that though. In 2010 at the residency in Iceland, my work shifted from being inspired by something outside myself to being driven by my own life experiences. Before that, I had been hesitant to make work that was too personal because I thought it would come across as over emotional, sentimental or unintelligent. Now I realize that a work can be smart and convey feeling without veering into sentimentality. I think this combination makes the best art. One of the first pieces that came out of my own experiences was an installation I did in Iceland called No One Receiving, which I later I turned into a two-channel video. I had the opportunity to use an amazing space, a scientific research lab that was formerly a fish processing plant, overlooking the harbor. At the time, I was going through some romantic struggles and feeling pretty heartbroken. It was a sad time for me. I was thinking a lot about communication and the difficulty of expressing strong emotions through words.
Captions 6
I had the idea to represent that by using morse code, something that also related to the maritime site. I ended up creating two light based morse code transmissions which I projected out to sea. One was a direct transcription of a love letter that I had written and the other was a traditional Icelandic love saga with roots in the town. The piece could be viewed from inside or outside the space and was visible from the harbor. I hoped that lovelorn sailors would see these stories and sit up on the deck watching into the night. A year or so later, I decided to weave together documentary footage of the piece with video that I had taken around Iceland. I wanted to create an overall portrait of my state of mind as well as the place. We are impressed by the powerful interchange between the prosaic and the spiritual in your work, a mythopoetic method similar to that of T.S. Eliot. Can you tell us
your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? Well, I do love Eliot. Every April, I re-read The Waste Land. I’m always amazed by the way he brings together different cultures and myths into an overarching consciousness. Generally, the artists I like have a mythopoetic bent, but not always. I’ve been interested in mythology and the occult since I was a kid, but felt insecure about making work about those things because I worried that it wouldn’t be taken seriously. I mentioned Kenneth Anger earlier and he’s a huge influence. Also, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The way they work with the “new age” without it being airy or touchy-feely gave me the confidence to embrace those kinds of influences in my own work. Francis Bacon has been a long-time favorite of mine. The fact that he doesn’t shy away from things that are dark and grotesque has taught me to let go of some of the self-imposed restraints I put on my own work. His embrace of
those darker realities captures something very real about being human, something primal. His work is emotional, but not gentle. In western culture, it seems like being emotional is synonymous with being weak. I don’t agree with this at all and I think Bacon’s work is one of the strongest refutations of this. It’s visceral, raw and powerful. I’ve only recently become familiar with Camille Henrot’s work, but I think she’s amazing. Her work is beautiful, intelligent and intuitive- all qualities that I admire and aspire to in my own work. I feel like she’s a kindred spirit in some ways. We have similar interests- anthropology and other cultures, religion, philosophy, Jungian psychology, nature- and I think there are certain parallels between our work. When I saw her video The Strife of Love in a Dream, I actually became uncomfortable because it felt so similar to Within Skin. There are many differences of course, but they both work with fear as a subject matter, use serpent imagery and weave together loosely connected imagery into a dream-like flow. The way she uses the serpent as a cross-cul-
Captions 7
tural symbol of fear reminds me of some of the ideas I was working with in an earlier project of mine, Sign Stimuli. I was taking archetypical elements from world creation myths and using them to tap into the collective emotions that those symbols evoke. This was the drawing project inspired by the writings of Joseph Campbell that I mentioned earlier. Campbell is another huge influence as well as Alan Watts. Their explanations of and insights into different forms of spirituality have been the starting point for many of my projects. I also admire the way they use simple language to explain complex ideas. Their writings have an unpretentious yet intelligent quality, which I hope my work has as well. There are so many others I could talk about, but lastly I’ll mention Stanley Kubrick. I saw 2001 when I was seventeen and it completely freaked me out. I don’t think any film before (and very
few since) had evoked such a strong emotional reaction in me. I watched it with a friend and afterwards had to drive home alone down all these dark and deserted roads. I was completely terrified and didn’t know why. I’ve thought a lot over the years about what it was that created such a rise in me. I think it was the fact that so much was left unexplained. It taught me that you could make a much more powerful statement by being suggestive rather than explicit. In these last years we have seen the frontier between Video Art and Cinema growing more and more vague: do you think that this "frontier" will continue to exist? I’m not a scholar on either subject so am probably not the best person to answer this, but yes, in my opinion this boundary will continue to exist. Even though there’s some crossover, I think that
Captions 8
the audience for cinema is different than for film/ video art. Cinematic films need to appeal to a wider audience to justify their existence. Since most people don’t have the desire to watch something purely experimental, mainstream movies need to focus on a story. Part of the reason people go to the cinema is to be entertained, which is less of a factor with an art piece where the audience is self-selecting. Film and video art doesn’t need to follow a traditional narrative arc where things are nicely resolved and everyone goes home satisfied. It doesn’t even need to tell a story. It can be completely abstract in a way that cinema can’t. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Katie. What's next for Katie Urban? Are there any new projects on the horizon? I have a couple of things in the works now. I’m in a landscape themed show opening next month and will be making a site-specific
photograph/ installation. I’m going to place a one-way mirror in front of a composite image made up of photographs taken around the site. The mirror creates a complex viewing surface, allowing the viewer to see a reflection of him or herself and his or her surroundings as well as the image behind it. The image is abstract and meant to suggest both a physical and an emotional landscape. I want to bring the viewer and the outside environment into the piece and create a metaphor for our own emotional landscapes- the things that are hidden beneath surface ap-pearances. After that, I’m hoping to start a new video. In March, I was in South Africa participating in an art festival. I also went on a one week safari and took a ton of video of wildlife and the surrounding landscape. I haven’t even looked at most of it, but from what I’ve seen, I think it has potential. In my typical fashion, I have no idea what it will become, but I’m excited to find out.