Susanna Battin: Key Observation Point

Susanna Battin uses video, installation, writing, painting, and social action to produce her research-driven projects, which focus on landscape optics and Romantic-period ethics. She began working with site interventions in 2011 with Window, a project that optically repaired a mountain horizon with a digital billboard. She has since orchestrated spatial interventions in the cities of Pasadena (2013) and Cassano d’Adda, Italy (2013). She has exhibited moving-image and performance work at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles; Pieter Space, Los Angeles; Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, California; Human Resources, Los Angeles; PhotoLA, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Cal State Long Beach. Her object-based work has recently been shown at Other Places Art Fair, San Pedro, California, and at Colorado College. In 2018 she was the visiting artist in residence at Turning Point School, Culver City, and Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts, where she led exercises in landscape visualization and storytelling. She is active in the self-organizing groups Mother Ditch, NAVEL, and OOLA. Her solo exhibition Key Observation Point was on view August 31–September 28, 2018, at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Battin lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated with her master’s in photography and media from Calarts in 2015.

Key Observation Point originated from artist Susanna Battin's interest in the "Landscape Scenic Quality Scale", a metric pioneered by a group of landscape architects and foresters in the late 20th century who sought to quantify beauty as a means of environmental protection. The scale’s system, language, and founding ideology are now embedded in the political process of legitimizing development projects of high impact. The Chiquita Canyon Landfill’s most recent Environmental Impact Report uses the "Landscape Scenic Quality Scale" to break down the site’s surrounding areas into seven key observation points.

• 1-Artist Information: 2018
• 2-Research Materials: 2017 – 2018
• 3-Artist Residency: Los Feliz Charter School, 2018
• 4-Exhibition Materials: 2018
• 5-Press Materials: 2018