Nachtfahrt

Christiane Baumgartner brings woodcut, the earliest form of image reproduction, into conversation with digital technology. Nearly all of her prints, including those in Nachtfahrt (Night Drive), begin as stills from videos Baumgartner records while on drives with her husband. She manipulates each image in Photoshop, imposing a filter of horizontal lines reminiscent of the scan lines of analog video, then traces the resulting image onto a sheet of wood that she cuts with simple knives.

In subject as well as in format, Nachtfahrt enacts a tension between time and stasis, motion and stillness. The subtle variations in composition and color across this series of nine prints prompt the eye to bounce from image to image, observing similarity and difference through the haze of night vision. Baumgartner’s images hover between the mundane and the insidious, as she manipulates seemingly innocuous industrial landscapes to resemble surveillance footage, nodding to her own childhood under the watchful regime of socialist East Germany.