the work of catherine meier

Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek is an animation that was projected on location at the Sage Creek campground in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Every evening for a week the animation was set up in a different location throughout the camp. Unpredictable happenings occurred as both campers and weather came and went. For me, this project was the ultimate fun as an artist – going out to the land from which I derive my inspiration, and drawings, to work and see how my artwork revealed or was transformed by its surroundings. 

The hand drawn animation for site: Sage Creek records and illuminates the temporality, fragility, and vastness of the ancient land located within and around the Sage Creek Campground. Graphite is set into motion through a draw, photograph, erase, and redraw method, and this earthy substance depicts grasses, sagebrush, and crumbling dirt. It reveals the detailed and changing horizon line, the shadows of passing, and the evolution of land as related to this place. These moving drawings that explore terrain become a visual poetry of place, allowing a viewer to relax into their rhythmic movement, or pause to catch detailed fragments of this overwhelming space. 

In projecting the animation at the site of its origins, Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek becomes art at play. Art connects to the world in a visceral way, creating a new space for encountering both the land and the artwork. It is also an act of ritual, maybe a prayer, paying homage and attention to land and place.  

This project was done working in cooperation with the National Park Service and through my residency at the park.

More images are available of this work. Please contact me for information. 

 

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Great Plains Quarterly Article

Amanda Breitbach was present for the last evening of projection, and wrote this piece on the happening for the Great Plains Quarterly.