Long Low Line (Fordland)

Dean extrapolated landscape images from 1920s Ford advertisements, leaving out the cars to focus on their representations of place and nature. She made the animation using a digital version of a multiplane camera technique employed in early Disney films to create an immersive and 3D illusion by separating two-dimensional images. This technique was itself inspired by Ford’s assembly line; Dean uses it to explore historical depictions of the American dream, exaggerating the subject matter’s fantastical style. [Overview courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art]