"The Day the Sky Hung Low", Ella Littwitz’s second solo exhibition at Harlan
Levey Projects, revisits the deserted geography around the Dead Sea, which has
inspired her practice for nearly a decade. It is in this inhospitable setting
that she finds extreme geography, geologic forces, and characteristics in the
shifting landscape that inform her work as they lead her to reflections on the
political, social, historical and cultural realities in the region.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, a new video titled "Ontology of the Void",
ponders the way millennia-long terrestrial processes are echoed in politics,
addressing a geological timescale as a means to think about the intractable
conflicts of the present. This metaphor is narrated as the viewer watches
accumulating piles of potash, a material that has been extracted from the waters
of the Dead Sea, while an ROV deposits an ingot of magnesium in the sea-bed.
This metal ingot, made of minerals extracted from that same location, in being
returned to the original source will soon dissolve again. Underlying this
extractive frenzy, the Dead Sea itself is rapidly disappearing. The name of this
terminal lake, which was once a metaphor for the impossibility of life to exist
in such salinity, is rapidly becoming prophetic.
The image of the artist rappelling down an 80-meter deep chimney-like cave in
Mount Sodom was filmed with a 360-degree video camera, which gives the
impression that she is floating in a time-and-space warp. As she descends, the
narrator tells the tale (and possible geological future) of the biblical
mountain of Sodom, “a symbol of society that sinned and was destined for
destruction.” We learn that as the mountain grows throughout the ages, the
future erosion will release Lot’s wife (an existing, almost abstract rock
formation on the banks of the Dead Sea) from her eternal punishment.
Apocryphally called Edith, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt as
punishment for looking back to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis
19). The two mirrored images that comprise the work "Edith" are made out of 3D
scans of the actual salt pillar facing itself. One of the images is looking
“backwards” The other, by looking the opposite way, must be looking “forwards”.
One looks to a past of destruction, the other then looks at an uncertain future,
but it remains to the viewers to decide which way each is looking – and what
exactly would be the difference between the past and the future, between what
one "Edith" and the other are contemplating.
All other works in the exhibition present geological features that are also a
metaphor to subjective sentiments and experiences. "Longing" is the bronze cast
of a crack in the ground. The exact origin of the crack is irrelevant, as the
title clearly reflects an emotional and social state of “cracking” rather than a
geological one. Likewise, the work "Tears" presents three sculptural crystals
that were taken from the bed of the Dead Sea. These are columns of salt that
grow invisibly until they reach the water surface and the sun. When they are
uprooted, and displaced, the salt that forms them starts slowly crying. These
“tears”, when dripped onto the bronze base, will trigger another eternal process
of oxidation, with the salt column itself ultimately disappearing.
The most personal works in the exhibition are perhaps a series of photographs
titled "The Day the Sky Hung Low". Through a complex process, Littwitz used a
photographic camera sensitive only to light outside of the visible spectrum. In
this way, the photographs of the sky record the unseen radiation. These images
were produced in relation to a disease the artist contracted from exposure to
radiation while undergoing radiation treatments that helped her body heal. The
title recalls the sense of the sky falling on one’s head when confronted by
life-threatening circumstances. The sky, of course, never actually falls at all.
There is a dissonance between physical and emotional realities, disappointment
when one doesn’t change with the other. Under each unique print is a time stamp.
A bit like a doomsday clock, the numbers show the hours and minutes counting
down to midnight, the end of the day the image was taken.
All the works presented relate to movement and dynamism: elements that grow up
from the sea bed, cracks that emerge, descending into darkness, staring up to
the sky. With varying degrees of futility, all search for the invisible and
ungraspable processes that take place inside the tiny microcosms of cells in our
bodies, as well as in millennial geological processes. When unchecked and
unseen, all of these long processes will end in a catastrophic collapse.
