Burchfield Collaborates : Artist Talk with Clara Riedlinger

Ideas of time and place permeate much of Clara Riedlinger's photography and film work. Her new project, Burned Over, explores the spiritual history of the Western New York landscape: documenting both the visible and invisible evidence of the many spiritual experiences which have shaped our cultural memory. Through a combination of still photography, audio, video, and animation, time collapses onto itself, creating the sense of a geographic memory in which the past, present, and future exist simultaneously.

Clara Riedlinger is a photographer and filmmaker born and raised in Rochester, NY. She received her BFA in Film and Video Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2016, and in 2021 earned her MFA in Film Production from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where she currently teaches live action film production. Clara has been an avid photographer from an early age, after watching her father operate his 4x5 field camera in the family's backyard. He gifted her his 1970s Canon F1 and she has seen the world through the lens of a camera ever since. Clara is a 5th generation Finger Lakes resident, and is deeply inspired by this unique landscape. Her artwork primarily focuses on the question of American Identity through landscape and cultural mythmaking, using documentary photography and experiential video that bridges fiction and documentary. She also studies old-time fiddle playing and American folklore and storytelling.