Elizabeth Littlejohn is GlogauAIR resident
from July, 2022 to September, 2022
Elizabeth Littlejohn is an artist from Toronto, who has been a resident artists at GlogauAIR. This interview is the result of a conversation between Savanna Fortgang and the artist that took place during September 2022 in the residency.
Meet the Artist
Savanna: What do you do as an artist? What is your process? Why do you create the art that you do – what are overarching themes in your artwork?
Elizabeth: I work in documentary film, augmented reality and photojournalism. I love cities, so I work as a visual researcher to analyze and document them. My particular area of interests are the housing crisis, climate disruption, and the overlooked, historical artifacts within cities.
S: How has your work evolved since being here at GlogauAIR? How has GlogauAIR changed your practice?
E: Being in Berlin has broadened my understanding of international housing issues in cities, and displacement through war and climate disruption. I have studied Berlin since I was a child, so being here, and studying a city with such a complex and multilayered history has been utterly captivating.
S: What’s next for you? Where do you see yourself going as an artist?
E: I would like to continue the project I began at GlogauAIR, and expand it into a short documentary.
S: How did your artist journey begin?
E: I have studied drawing since I was twelve years old, and I have studied in Montréal, New York City, and Toronto. I now teach augmented reality, social innovation, sustainable design, and animation.
S: Do you find art residencies important?
E: Very. Art residencies enable an international, multigenerational community to meet over time in an intentional community, and share artistic strategies, different cultures, and help each other produce art. They are an incubator for brainstorming and supportive networking.
S: What does your art process look like? How does it connect with you and the art you make?
E: I spend many hours on my bicycle, collecting images, footage, and photogrammetry scans to add to my augmented-reality locales, posters, and stickers. Documenting Berlin has informed much of my work, and my time in Berlin has been incredible. It truly is the ‘never-ending city’.
Statement
Elizabeth Littlejohn focuses on visualizing the psychogeography of historic buildings in cities. As a Toronto-based augmented reality artist, she creates fantastical facades from recording details of buildings through photogrammetry and audio interviews. As Elizabeth stitches together these stories, she creates these building facades in virtual reality to view their multilayered transformation, then re-incorporates these facades into augmented reality.
Accessed through AR smartphone applications, these virtual facades and interviews can be viewed on buildings in situ as memory palimpsests.
GlogauAIR Project
Elizabeth Littlejohn’s project proposes re-creating facades of Berlin buildings, carefully chosen to have a complex history, as fantastical projections and memory palimpsests for a smartphone augmented reality tour, and as part of a screen-based, interactive exhibition at GlogauAIR. This further develops her work for the “The Toronto Island Puzzle Tour” and “Theater Palimpsest”, and develops a Berlin-based augmented reality tour as a cross cultural project between Berlin and Toronto.
CV Summary
- Elizabeth is an augmented reality artist and documentary film maker.
- In 2018 she directed “Leelah’s Highway’, a broadcast half hour focusing on the loss of trans youth, Leelah Alcorn, and ‘Frolic’s Haunt’, a nine-minute documentary about a queer, accessible haunted house. Both have been shown international film festivals.
- In 2022 Elizabeth completed the feature documentary ‘The City Island’ about the Toronto Island’s history of resistance, and the City of Toronto’s Artworx Grant for the ‘Toronto Island Puzzle Tour’.
- Recipient of numerous arts councils grants, she has shown at ISEA 2020/2021.
Gallery
