Review: Transom (2011) by Sara Ludy
Sara Ludy, USA, 2011, video, 2 min, color, sound
Transom (2011), by L.A.-based artist and musician, Sara Ludy, is a well-wrought spatial study of architecture, shape, and transient eye trace.
Backed by an Angelo Badalamenti-esque soundtrack, which is composed by Ludy, the short video essentially tilts down for its two minutes as still imagery of buildings are matted, masked, and wiped, to animate a chain of abstracted imagery, peppered with line-pattern experimentation and deconstruction of window and frame.
My favorite aspect of Transom is that it exudes deep-seated Ludyian qualities, viz., a personal and artistic edifice, a sense of place, or home, or lodging. It brushes those special moments during childhood when you did a tripod or a handstand, upside-down looking at the ceiling, pretending the ceiling was the floor; or when losing sight and grounding while spacing-out at a peculiar view inside your house, a hallway and doorway framing to other framings, a ‘where am I, what is this?’ sort of exercise.
Transom is the process of building and living and looking; a framework of building a home; the paradox of moving forward to settle down; a transient sense of place and going where new experiences await, exploring the will to create along the merry way of a patient wait.
How do you build a home with art? First, you must gather your materials (inspiration, experience, life). Next, you must blueprint (volition, cause-and-effect, intention, imagination, action). After that is the building (creating) process, where the builder must carry forth and build with positive purpose and with artistic involution. Sara Ludy is building her home (oeuvre) and Transom is a significant efflorescent step forward in augmenting her video work.
Half of motion picture is sound, and Sara Ludy, a musician of the band Tremblexy, composes her animation with a portentous bed of undulating noise, and Ludy’s scrupulous care with sound vis-a-vis picture builds a mysteriously-mobile home in just two minutes, a window to the sawtooth subset of video art in the year 2011.
— AR
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