Tiara Carlson
The exhibit that struck me the most was titled Shotgun Landscape. It was created by Chris Larson in 2007 using HDV, with a running time of about 15 minutes. I unintentionally caught the end of the film first, which was just a video image of a rural Minnesotan landscape.
It instantly triggered memories of me as a young girl on the farm I grew up on up north. Tall, dry, light-brown grasses covered the ground as far as the eye could see. The sky was an intense grey-blue without a cloud in the sky (which also happens to be the color of my room at home, hmmm….). And just as I was beginning to notice even more details, the film ended and started over. I took a seat and decided to watch it from the beginning.
Shotgun Landscape begins with blackness. The blackness is actually the painted side of a wall made from plywood for the film. After a few seconds of black a hole appears in the center of the black wall. It appears quickly and seemingly from out of nowhere, and it suddenly makes sense as to why it’s titled Shotgun Landscape. For every hole created by the shotgun another piece of the landscape appears. By the end of the film every visible inch of the black wall is gone, and the landscape is in it’s entirety.
I was intrigued by the idea of a shotgun being used to created something beautiful, which I think alludes to the fact that Minnesota can be beautiful and dangerous at the same time. It can also be tied into the fact that hunting is a widely practiced activity in Minnesota, it’s almost as if the shotgun is responsible for the landscape that appears on the video. The rough edges of the holes add a sort of rustic quality to the video, and eventually start to “frame� the landscape.
The landscape that’s recorded gives off a strong sense of isolation- there’s no buildings, people, or even any animals in the video. The trees in the foreground appear to be dead- they don’t have any leaves, and the only patch of green is on the ground running from the bottom right of the video to the left. It’s easy to see how a place like the one in the video could drive someone mad. Nothing changes in the 15 minutes of the video. The only movement is that of the trees and the grass swaying as a continual breeze blows by. The light doesn’t change, and there are no shadows to speak of. It almost seems as if time has stopped.
It also reminds me of how small my world felt when I used to live up north. Most people don’t tend to think about what’s beyond the closest town, or that it’s even possible to get there and explore for yourself. Shotgun Landscape narrowed my vision to only what was caught on the video, what I was seeing was what’s important and nothing else.