Archive for December, 2006

You have NEVER seen a movie like this! Catherine Sullivan creates weirdly moving video installations that investigate recieved notions of performance. Her work is fantastic. Be sure to check out her work this month here:

Sat December 2 2006 – Sat January 27 2007

For Catherine Sullivan’s first exhibition in Scotland CCA will present 2 works by the acclaimed artist who lives and works in Los Angeles – Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (2003), a multi screen projection and The Resuscitation of Uplifting, (2005), a single screen work recently acquisitioned by Tate at Frieze Art Fair 2006

Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (2003) is a video installation that takes as its point of departure the Chechen rebel takeover of the Russian musical Nord-Ost in 2002, in which the actors and audience were held hostage for several days in a Moscow theatre. These scenes derive from Sullivan’s interpretation of Veniamin Kaverin’s Two Captains (1942), a classic Russian love and adventure novel about polar aviation and Russian expansion in the Arctic Sea upon which the musical Nord-Ost was based. Sullivan re-creates the ten sections of the novel through a series of forty vignettes. Each actor learned roughly fifty pantomime-like actions that recall the traditions of musical theatre and was then filmed performing them in various choreographed combinations. Primarily shot at the Polish American Army Veterans Association in Chicago, the footage is presented on five screens. One larger screen shows foundational gestures of the novel, while the four smaller screens depict spin-offs in other locations, suggesting a narrative development. Using the actors’ bodies as vehicles of expression and the theatre as a site for emotional transcendence, Sullivan situates the Moscow siege within the context of an artistic production, resulting in a conflation of the real and the imaginary.

This video installation was featured along with the related performance Sullivan directed that took place in the Angel Orensanz Foundation with roughly thirty actors from Chicago’s Trapdoor Theatre on April 10 and 11, 2004, as part of the Whitney Biennial Performance Series.

The Resuscitation of Uplifting, a new piece created in 2005, is a single-channel colour video transferred from 16mm film, with sound. The piece comes to CCA from the Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels. Recently acquisitioned by Tate at Frieze Art Fair 2006, the work is part of a broader piece of work known as the The Chittendens, a six screen video installation, first exhibited in the UK at Tate Modern in 2005.
To make the film, Sullivan dressed sixteen actors in conventional costumes that bring to mind stereotypes from nineteenth and twentieth-century America, such as the Secretary, the Muscle Man or the Management Executive. Sullivan then envisioned fourteen different ‘attitudes’ – an emotion to perform or a character to embody – and asked each of the sixteen actors to perform according to one or more of these attitudes. Some of the attitudes are behavioural patterns that Sullivan derived from emotional reactions or situations, while others are formal patterns, akin to musical notation, borrowed from performance history or contemporary dance. Each performance varies in duration and form, condensing or expanding according to rhythmic combinations.

‘Critical to the discussion of all works of mine are the devices employed to produce and generate the behaviours of the performers who execute them. Be they written texts, stylistic economies and gestural regimes, or re-enactments of historic performances, I have always viewed these devices as a means to animate qualities in each performer and bring to bear on the performance itself circumstances of training or cultural orientation through a biography of familiar or absorbed forms. Performers, especially actors absorb and regenerate aspects of the behavioural regimes we are all subject to, and in this sense each project has begun with a certain anthropological interest.’
Catherine Sulivan, Galerie Bastide, 2006

We just heard about these from our friends at Daily Candy. They say you can order online, but I would get going NOW. Only 22 days to go!

From Daily Candy:

December 4, 2006 Color Your World When it comes to the good things, you learned early not to sit around and wait. Take the kindergarten Crayola conundrum: The longer you savored a fresh box (oh, periwinkle or wisteria?), the greater the chance someone would get her grubby little hands on your perfect points. Got it: Slowpokes finish last. (And get stuck with broken crayons.) So hurry up and get yourself a Storytelling crayon, a tiny sculpture carved from a single Crayola by local artist Diem Chau. (We know: totally charming.) The Cornish alum (who has exhibited at Howard House, ConWorks, and SAM) mines playground memories for inspiration, creating childlike portraits that echo the universal. If pieces like “Act of Defiance in Green” (an overall-clad Ramona Quimby look-alike) don’t grab you, Chau takes commissions — like the dreadlocked likeness Whoopi Goldberg ordered. Some call it “Comedienne in Sunset Orange.” Too bad it’s not the color purple. Available at Howard House, 604 Second Avenue, between James and Cherry Streets (206-256-6399); online at diemchau.com.