FRAME: Mixed media installation, single-channel video, and photographs
In this video, a group of male and female construction workers assemble a steel structure while speaking from feminist theoretical texts and poems.The piece is shown inside a built construction environment mirroring the one in the video, and is accompanied by architectural photographs. Frame seeks to problematize the stereotypes of a traditionally male form of labor and other socially defined gender roles through the performance of feminist readings about women’s labor and the body. It also seeks to explore the ways we perform our class and gender, and how the relationships between men an women are written.
Clip coming soon.
Video still, Frame, 2011
FRAME: Live Performance, Installation, 2011
In this project, a group of male construction workers assemble a wooden structure while speaking from feminist theoretical texts.
The piece explores the connections between language, labor, and the body.
Performance still, Abrons Arts Center, 2011
I Am Not a Man, Not Now: Single Channel Video,14 Minutes, 2011
Made in collaboration with Elise Rasmussen
In this piece, Elise Rasmussen and I explore Antigone in its references to the roles of women in ancient Greece. We read the play
as both proto-feminist and misogynistic, where the protagonist engages in acts of brave civil disobedience, but is also
used as an example of a stereotypical feminine tendency to feel rather than think. Rasmussen and I seek to draw attention to the way
language is used against women in the play, its loss and gain of intention through time, and its relevance today, choosing a contemporary
translation of the play by Robert Fagles.
Clip coming soon.
Don't Tread on Me: Three Channel Video installation, Photographs, Live Performance, 2011
For this project, I collaborated with participants that include members of the Tea Party, Ayn Rand enthusiasts, Libertarians, ex-communists,
artists, and stockbrokers with one thing in common: they are all in favor of free-market capitalism. Through a series of interviews, encounters, Greek-style
choruses and other choreographed ensemble elements, both fiction and documentary, the videos, photographs and performances in the work
explore the way politics are formed and articulated.
Play Clip: 4:00
Performance still, Momenta Art, Feb. 6 2011, Photo by Alesia Exum
The End of All Resistance: Single Channel Video, 29 Minutes, 2010
In this piece, I invited two US army interrogators to teach and role play "emotional interrogation techniques" according to 2006 US Army Field Manual 22-2-3. I then transposed their performance into extended improvisations with two female actors and a married couple in a domestic setting, enacting scenarios based on the interrogators' demonstrations. The work explores interrogation as recognizable and similar to the interactions we engage in every day, and the kinds of performances we use to communicate power.
Acting Out: Single Channel Video Installation, 19 minutes, 2010
Made In collaboration with Austin Shull
play and precursor to the Theater of the Absurd. The fragmented rehearsals and performances by the actors highlight the arbitrary and farcical nature of our systems
of confinement and incarceration.
I Lay Claim to You: Single Channel Video Installation, 6 minutes, 2009
In I Lay Claim to You, I invite choreographer Khalia Frazier to translate a text — appropriating themes from Margaret Mead's 1938 description of a Balinese cremation —
into a dance. In an improvised rehearsal, Frazier and I perform attitudes of identification: claiming and reclaiming ownership of the dancers and of each other. The
dancers operate as a Chorus, mediating and transcribing the process. I conflate tropes of cultural inscription with the situation of a rehearsal to engage difference and
sameness as changeable, conditional and contested categories, whose instability is political.
Play Clip: 1:00
Palindrome: 2-channel Video, 45 minutes, 2009
Palindrome is about 2 characters exploring and performing in environments of captivity.
Play Clip: 1:00
Immigrant Palace: Super 16mm film, Video, Installation, 2009
As Italy grows increasingly bold in its anti-immigration rhetoric and practice (encouraged by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the newly elected Gianni Alemanno, mayor of Rome and former fascist), collaboration across religion and culture becomes a tool with which to approach and examine and appropriate these ideological divides. Collaborating with Redouane Niraoui, a devout Muslim and naturalized Italian citizen of Moroccan descent, we piece together a narrative of his daily religious and private rituals as a resistance to his experience of social alienation in mainstream Italian culture.
Play Clip: 4:00
No Man's Land, Video, 2008
No Man's Land centers on the dissonance between seer and seen, writer and actor, translator and inhabitant. The piece explores the
challenges of storytelling in an economically polarized world that is fixed on insider/outsider-based notions of identity and access.
In transcribing the imagined, disengaged experience of an invisible woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, alongside my own tourist narrative,
I make a spectacle of this frustration. This piece seeks to engage the political and intimate frustrations experienced in the search for embodiment.
Temps Mort, Photographs, 2007
A squatter’s building in Biella, Italy was purchased by condominium developers in Fall 2007. Prior to its rehab I interviewed the architect
who was transforming the building into condominiums and spent seven days confined to the building, making photographs in the former
dwellings of the dispossessed inhabitants.
See all images
Room 101: Single Channel Split Screen Video (1 Hour) /Performance (10 Hours), 2007
During an artist’s residency in Italy in 2007, I asked ten participants each to spend one hour alone in a white room while being filmed,
while I performed the part of an ambiguous “attendant” waiting outside in constructed set resembling an office space, monitoring the
participants and listening to Fox News Radio for the ten consecutive hours of the project. This piece was made in collaboration with Zorka Wollny.
Play Clip: 2:30
The Official: 3-Channel Video Installation, 2007
Shot in the United Nations in New York, what first appears to be an interview conducted with a diplomat by an unnamed interviewer
shifts into a fractured narrative. The characters use uncertain games, gestures of control and attitudes of intimacy to suggest larger cultural
tensions and ambiguities.
To see a clip from this installation, please contact Chelsea Knight directly.
