Baker Artist Portfolios

Sara Dittrich is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist. Dittrich’s work is often informed by residencies and travel. These locations often afford collaborations, community, and materials that inspire new bodies of site-specific work. Such projects have included timelapse imaging of landscapes, local skies and tidal patterns, and the somatic effects of time and a place on the body. Her artworks and exhibitions include sculpture, musical performance, printmaking, video, and interactive artworks activated by biometric data. Trained as both musician and visual artist, Dittrich creates multisensory experiences that are experienced in real-time using musical thinking to illuminate the dynamic and unconscious rhythms of the body and environments.

Residencies and research programs have included Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Sculpture Space, and Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague) when she studied under Dominik Lang. She was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA). She is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Mary Sawyers Baker Artist Award. Dittrich’s work has been exhibited with numerous venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Sculpture Center (Cleveland), and DiverseWorks (Houston). Her work has been published in Floorr Magazine and BmoreArt. Her performances and screenings have been presented by CultureHub, Revolutions per Minute Film Festival, and Maryland Art Place.

STATEMENT

The focus of my artistic practice lies in making the viewer conscious of the unconscious bodily rhythms of everyday life—breathing, walking, beating. I build introspective experiences that shift perspective from passive seeing to active looking, from passive hearing to active listening. My mediums include everything from sculpture, prints, video, and interactive installations with biometric sensors, and data-driven performance. In my most recent works I seek to compare tempos of the human body with rhythms in the landscape, as a method to consider—and place within personal, felt experience—human relationship with the changing climate. These multi-sensory experiences use the body’s circulatory system as a means of fielding questions about close listening and ecological healing. I encourage the audience to slow down, engage in sensory perception, and find moments of refuge in their environment. Through my works I invite viewers to consider the agency of their own somatic experience. Devices such as repetition, liveness, and collaboration filter in the physical rhythms and movements of the body created by the accumulation of footsteps, breaths, and heartbeats. These tools place the viewer in the here and now, creating spaces to "be".