Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome Laura Kraning to UnionDocs for a rare presentation of her visually arresting and sonically rich body of work—films that reveal the spectral presence of landscape, infrastructure, and decay with an intensity that’s both meditative and electric.

Kraning’s films traverse geological time, industrial ruins, and speculative terrains through a precise and tactile engagement with image and sound. From malfunctioning printers and fossil beds to tar pits and solar fields, her works summon strange new visions from the raw material of place. This screening brings together eight of her short films made between 2014 and 2024—ranging from ghostly macro-textures of the Rust Belt to machine-assisted portraits of urban and planetary futures.

Though her films have shown widely at festivals and museums, this is a rare chance to see them as a full program in NYC—and to experience their cumulative effect: an excavation of unseen histories, ruptured ecologies, and haunted surfaces.

Laura Kraning will be in conversation with media artist and writer Melissa Friedling following the screening. Come through for this luminous evening!

Program

ESP

3 mins, 2024

A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City, Albany, N.Y.

“Glitchy, warped photographs of Albany’s modernist Empire State Plaza are paired with percussive digital noise. The erratic imagery was ‘co-created with a malfunctioning Canon inkjet printer,’ a complete accident that Kraning interpreted as the machine “asserting its agency.” In a time where the use of generative AI is hotly debated, the unintentional intervention of a broken printer could be interpreted as degenerative image making, a ghost in the machine.” – Alex Truong

Landforms

12 mins, 2024

LANDFORMS unearths the physical remains of past and future geological strata. The film explores two landscapes, an industrial rock quarry turned recreational fossil hunting park, in which 380-million-year-old fossils were discovered beneath the rocks where once flowed a shallow sea, and a public waterway whose shore is dispersed with brightly colored fragments of consumer waste in the form of microplastics. Both landscapes reveal a process of digging and gathering, of collecting evidence of earth’s pre-historic past, or intervening in humanity’s toxic futures. The forms, of ancient sea creatures and broken plastic, mesh and intertwine into a meditation on deep time and a reflection on extinction.

de-composition

3 mins, 2023

A textural macro collage of a rust belt landscape- scratched, splattered, dripping, cracking, and bursting to the surface. Photographed and meticulously edited over one year in Buffalo, NY, the reverberant tones of the New York Central rail line provide the rhythmic pulse to a rapid cascade of multi-hued material decay and metallic de-composition.

Fracture

4 mins, 2020

FRACTURE mines the slips between stillness and motion, as cracks and fissures of bark and stone are spliced and layered, frame by frame, intersecting slices of time.  Gathered and assembled over two years, the scarred surfaces of tree limbs and stratified rock collide with slabs of marble and clusters of moss, crystallizing into a flickering mirage of radiating branches and splintered veins of iridescence.

Las Breas

12 mins, 2019

LAS BREAS is an observational portrait of three tar pits, of which there are only six in the entire world. Situated in three distinct landscapes in Southern California – urban Los Angeles, the oil fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and Carpinteria Beach, LAS BREAS investigates the spaces between archiving the pre-historic and the contemporary industrial landscape. While skeletons of extinct megafauna and vintage animatronic beasts are on display in the heart of Hollywood, the sticky remains of ancient microscopic organisms seep to the surface of both land and sea. Of the earth, yet primordial and impenetrable, the bubbling tar that rises from the depths speaks of past extinction and human exploitation of the earth’s limited resources.

Meridian Plain

18 mins, 2016

MERIDIAN PLAIN maps an enigmatic distant landscape excavated from hundreds of thousands of archival still images, forecasting visions of a possible future, transmitted from a mechanical eye.

Irradiant Field

10 mins, 2016

Mirroring sky and earth, solitary mechanical sentinels follow the sun, while metal grids rain in a parched California landscape. Irradiant Field is a visual and sonic portrait at the intersection of nature and machine – a desert mirage of light, wind, water, and metallic reflection.

Port Noir

11 mins, 2014

Within the vast machine landscape of Terminal Island, the textural strata of a 100 year old boat shop provides a glimpse into Los Angeles Harbor’s disappearing past. Dwarfed by massive container terminals, the cumulative scenic details of the last working boatyard, often recast as an underworld backdrop for fictional crime dramas, evoke imaginary departures and a hidden world at sea.

Program Duration: 73 mins

Bios

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates liminal spaces at the intersection of nature and machine and have been described as a form of “esoteric archeology,” delving into an experience of the subconscious of a landscape. In her most recent films, she deconstructs the material textures of landscape at 12 frames per second, mining the slips between stillness and motion. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, REDCAT Theater, and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, Jury Awards at the 2010, 2015 and 2016 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award at the 2016 Athens International Film and Video Festival, the Jury Award for Short Film at the 2018 Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas, a 2019 NYSCA/Wave Farm Media Arts Grant, a 2023 New York State Council for the Arts Support for Artists Grant and the 2025 Ribalta Animata Best Film Award at the Ribalta Experimental Film Festival. Laura currently resides in New York, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University of Buffalo.

Melissa Friedling is a media artist, writer, and educator interested in the jumbled layers of media histories.  Much of her work begins with found or ‘happened upon’ media that prompts an excavation of the marginalized and sometimes metaphysical narratives contained within them. Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally at venues including Barbican Centre (London, UK), Tribeca Film Festival (NY), PS1 MoMA (NY), Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA), Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo), Art Space (New Haven), Microscope Gallery (NY); New Orleans International Film Festival, Ann Arbor (MI), Atlanta Film Fest. Select honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts, a Fulbright Award, and residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and International Studio and Curatorial Program.  Melissa is also the founder and owner of Slouch Productions.  She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at The New School in New York City.