Catherine Sullivan

Redress Workbook, Vandal Studio
September 20 – November 2

Opening Reception: Friday, September 20, 5 – 8 PM

Catherine Sullivan
Redress Workbook, Vandal Studio
2024
16mm film transferred to digital media, black and white with sound
40 minutes

With performers Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder (HIJACK), Carolyn Benjamin, Assaf Abraham Hochman, Manuela Rentea and Bob Wilson, Catherine Sullivan imagines the decommissioning of Pioneer Mother monuments in a black and white film segmented into three parts.

VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: I am the voice in the darkness breaking my silence.
VANDAL: You are a child of the grief she tries to grasp through all of this… artistic murk.
VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: What are these songs?
VANDAL: Psalters, communal singing which organizes the Puritan mind.
VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: You want me to go with her to the riverbank?
VANDAL: Yes, return her to her narrative of captivity. Go animate her past, I will make sure she manually encounters her crimes. You expose the transactions, and I’ll keep her mind moving forward and her body back.

At the feet of these poor prisoners, their Abenaki captors bow’d, they fell, they lay down; at their feet they bow’d, they fell; where they bow’d, there they fell down dead.

VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: It’s like a serpentine line for a ride, it moves forward and back!
VANDAL: Yes, the statue of Goodwife Duston is blurring, bisecting, dragging, lingering in retrograde.
VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: You’re building a genre.
VANDAL: It phases in and out. An amalgam of possible structures with different iteration points, rules we can break anywhere, until she holds her past in her present and remains perfectly still.
VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: And goes soft?
VANDAL: Or hard, set to be cracked open again and again.
VANDAL’S PROTÉGÉ: Was she home schooled too? Thank you for helping me learn.
VANDAL: Keep it disorganized. Strike a balance between stream of consciousness and historical fact. And don’t let them take your picture.

Born in Los Angeles (1968) and based in Chicago, Catherine Sullivan works in film, theatre and installation. With ensembles of performers and regular collaborators, her work is often concerned with aesthetic behaviors in historically conditioned contexts. Solo exhibitions include the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metro Pictures, New York; Tate Modern, London and Kunsthalle Zürich. She has exhibited in the Lyon, Whitney, Moscow and Gwang Ju biennials, Berlin International Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam. Theatre works have been staged at venues including Opéra de Lyon; Volksbühne, Berlin; Cricoteka, Krakow and Trap Door Theatre, Chicago. Awards include a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency, a United States Artists Walker Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a BFA in Acting from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design. She is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Arwen Wilder, Assaf Abraham Hochman, Bob Wilson, Carolyn Benjamin, Catherine Sullivan, Chicago, Kristin Van Loon, Manuela Rentea, Redress Workbook Vandal Studio, Regards, West Town