Catherine Meier: Standing Witness

Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek, by Catherine Meier (MFA 2009) was featured at Badlands National Park — Sage Creek Campground Labor Day Weekend. 

Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek is a hand drawn animation that records and illuminates the temporality, fragility, and vastness of the ancient land located within and around the Sage Creek Campground in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park. 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.

The animation will be set up every evening, allowing for unpredictable happenings as both campers and weather come and go. For me, it is the ultimate fun as an artist, going out to the land from which I derive my inspiration to explore how the artwork I make is revealed or transformed by its natural surroundings.