Catherine Sullivan. Still from The Startled Faction, 2018. Digital video, color/sound, 35 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Trained as an actor and visual artist, Catherine Sullivan (American, born 1968) began publicly presenting film, theater and installation works in the early 2000s. Her early works are concerned with the psychic and cultural dilemmas inherent in dramatic acting and the ways in which history is projected through the body. She has collaborated extensively with composer Sean Griffin and with artists and ensembles nationally and internationally.
Performers in her film and theater works cope with written texts, gestural and choreographic regimes, stylistic economies, and conceptual orthodoxies animating contestations and unfinished business drawn from the locations where she shoots. These anxious and highly aestheticized worlds are populated by perplexing bodies who animate questions of self-possession and redress through the curious dimension of empathy and aversion that unfolds between the performer and viewer.
Presented by the Society for Contemporary Art
