Bilbao, 1981. Lertxundi calls her praxis "Landscape Plus", a way of randomly combining observational photography and group exercises with music, actions, and events; establishing parallels between earth and body as centres of pleasure and experience.
Laida Lertxundi received a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Bard College. She has had solo screenings and exhibitions at museums, festivals, and galleries across the United States and the world, and teaches in the Fine Art and Humanities programs at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
“I work with 16mm motion picture film, photography and printmaking in a process I call Landscape Plus, documenting California landscapes while bringing equal attention to sound, people and the passage of time. My work moves between intimate interior architectures and the magnitude of open landscapes to map out a geography transformed by affective and subjective states.
I employ a fragmentary approach to editing in which cinematic forms of storytelling are replaced by a focus on process and materiality. I’m interested in the tension between form and the experience that will always exceed it. I present the environment from an embodied female position with a radical appreciation for everything that we have to lose”.