Watching: Long Low Line (Fordland)

Overview

Dean extrapolated landscape images from 1920s Ford advertisements, leaving out the cars to focus on their representations of place and nature. She made the animation using a digital version of a multiplane camera technique employed in early Disney films to create an immersive and 3D illusion by separating two-dimensional images. This technique was itself inspired by Ford’s assembly line; Dean uses it to explore historical depictions of the American dream, exaggerating the subject matter’s fantastical style. [Overview courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art]