a curator's office in a micro gallery setting
now at the micro gallery
Kathryn Cornelius: Common Ground
Curator's Office is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Washington, DC-based artist Kathryn Cornelius entitled Common Ground. The gallery will show several bodies of work by this noted performance artist all loosely united around the multi-layered concept of "ground" and a search for the spiritual in everyday life. Cornelius displays two videos, Common Ground (version 1.0) and Return, and two bodies of photo-based works, Reach and Hidden World, that document her performative actions in the landscape. An exhibition brochure by Jeffry Cudlin, Director of Exhibitions at the Arlington Arts Center, will accompany the show. An Artist Talk will be held in the gallery on Saturday, December 15, 2007 at 5pm.
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Cornelius capitalizes on dark humor and unusual theatricality in her performative works, many of which slyly comment upon artworld practices of commerce, commodification, celebrity-making, and gentrification. Cudlin writes, "In Common Ground, her first one-woman show at Curator's Office, Cornelius's dark humor remains evident, as does her enthusiasm for absurd or self-defeating gestures. But in this exhibition she leaves behind her critique of gallery culture feeding frenzies. Instead, she ventures off the grid and into the wilderness. In the videos and photographs presented here, Cornelius invents a different sort of persona, one that is lost somewhere in the natural landscape or in the void of an accelerated digital age. In these pieces, Cornelius appears silent, collected - ready, perhaps, to disappear from the world altogether.
Cornelius uses performance, photography and video almost interchangeably, not committing herself to any one way of operating. She tends to favor low tech, readily available, consumer-friendly formats: The show's titular video, for example, is available for sale as an mp4. Much of the work in Common Ground relates directly to her daily life-her intimate engagements with technology, place, and spirituality." The artist continues to explore her interest in the frailties of communication and language -- both visual and textual -- and the difficulties we face in establishing connections with each other externally and the infinite within.
Read Jeffry Cudlin's essay
Read the Artinfo.com review
Read The Washington City Paper review
Kathryn Cornelius holds an M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University. Most recently her work was exhibited in an international museum exhibition, Eroi? Come Noi... curated by Julia Draganovic at the Palazzo delle Arti, Naples, Italy. Next year her work will be included in an important survey of conceptual art, If the World Was Clear There'd be No Art, organized by Documenta IX curator Jan Hoet, at the MARTa Herford Museum, Herford, Germany. Cornelius has exhibited her work at Curator's Office, Washington, DC; Anita Beckers Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany; Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, MD; Area 405, Baltimore, MD; The Loop Festival, Madrid, Spain; The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach; the Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY; Art Not Ads, Washington, DC: the Greater Reston Art Center, Reston, VA; the Ellipse Art Center, Arlington, VA: Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY; DCAC, Washington, DC; Artscape, Baltimore, MD; and the Warehouse, Washington, DC (a WPA/C project). Performances have taken place in numerous public venues in Washington, DC; ArtBasel Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL; Scope Miami, Miami, FL; artDC Fair, Washington, DC; and Tate Britain, London, UK among others. Recently she was named a Semi-Finalist for the prestigious Sondheim Prize and received a Young Artist grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.