Sara Ludy premieres Desert Rose—a new live audiovisual performance that arranges found imagery and field recordings into a rhythmic composition of otherworldly forms.

Ludy has worked with browsed images since 2000, generating works such as Low Prim and Postcards. More recently, she has collected pictures of natural disasters, tragedy and death, or what she calls “everyday horror.” In this special project for Lampo, she alters these images until they become unrecognizable, shaping them into undulating 3D bodies and landscapes. Ludy also adds layered sound—air-conditioner hum and the buzz of traffic, trees, birds and insects recorded from her workspace while browsing online.

By combining materials from these dissimilar environments, and then filtering them through her intuitions, Ludy’s performance becomes an opportunity for the artist to expel the effects of image saturation through a meditative process.

“It is not my intention to simply transform horror into beauty,” she writes. “It is a method I work with to find balance and peace in the world today.”

Sara Ludy (b.1980, Orange, Calif.) is a Chicago-based artist whose practice investigates the confluence of the physical and virtual. Her work incorporates photography, Second Life, animation, video, sound and live performance. Recent exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; bitforms gallery, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver; Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Carroll Fletcher, London; Espace Verney-Carron, Lyon; and C-Space, Beijing.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; support provided by mediaThe foundation inc.

Artist Talk: Sara Ludy discusses current and recent works that relate to ideas in her Lampo performance. Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #1656. Friday, November 4, 6 p.m.