exhibitions - what happens
Kathryn Cornelius: The Feeling of What Happens
May 14 - June 26, 2010
Opening night reception, May 14, 2010, 6-8 pm
Curator's Office is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of noted performance artist, Kathryn Cornelius. In the exhibition, The Feeling of What Happens, Kathryn Cornelius presents three new video series that investigate how frames of interaction can be constructed to elicit emotive responses in the viewer, and how our individual experience and underlying biological systems come to bear on how we make meaning out of action. Cornelius explores the flexibility of the term 'performance' through such diverse performative subjects as physical people and their actions, video editing as choreography, narrative and dialog construction, and visual versus auditory context. Each series is an experiment towards engaging the audience interactively in the work so that the feeling of what happens is ultimately expressed by the viewer.
exhibition essay by Vjera Borozan
quotes from Home Again, Home Again (A Comedy)
quotes from Home Again, Home Again (A Tragedy)
The first series includes How We Learn to Love, two videos in which the dynamics of interpersonal relationships are explored through simplistic actions and the extremes of their expression; the two extremes of love and hate are a thin line of equal intensity, yet of different affect. In the second series Or, Death Speaks for Us, Cornelius creates images without images, text and context without explicit visual grounding. These videos are small, intimate looks into the personal lives of individuals that serve as mini-portraits, imagined narratives of what these individuals may experience and see in their final moments. The third series, Home Again, Home Again, presents two alternatives to the film "trailer" form - the comedy version and the tragedy version. The dialog is comprised entirely of popular movie quotations, divorced from their original context and utterance, and juxtaposed together to form a loose narrative structure. Nearly the same video clips and dialog are used in each version, but both trailers are created with different soundtracks and clip placement to elicit a targeted emotional response.
The exhibition of 7 videos and 4 related photographs presents a maelstrom of tragicomic emotions with the goal of engaging the viewer as the ultimate producer of each of the presented works. According to Cornelius, "We are our own storytellers, and the story does not exist / the artwork does not exist, without our own narrative constituting the final expression of the work."
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Czech curator and art historian Vjera Borozan, who was a curator at The National Gallery Prague and is now a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles University, Prague, and a fellow at tranzit, a network of autonomous initiatives in contemporary art in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.
Kathryn Cornelius was born in 1978 in Binghamton, NY and currently lives and works in Washington, DC. As an interdisciplinary artist, her practice combines performance, video, installation, photography, sound, and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited nationally in cities such as the Bronx, New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, and internationally in Frankfurt, Germany; Herford, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Naples, Italy. She has studied performance documentation with Hayley Newman, and has participated in public performances by Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. In 2009 she was awarded a fellowship to the Mildred's Lane artist residency program, directed by artists Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett.