Catherine Sullivan

Catherine Sullivan
Five Economies (big hunt / little hunt)

15 February - 22 March 2003

Catherine Sullivan exhibits her multi-screen video installation, Five Economies (big hunt / little hunt), at Metro Pictures from 15 February through 22 March.

Five Economies is a two-part work whose main component, Big Hunt, is a mural-sized, five-screen video projection. The silent black and white footage, which is based on a variety of themes and sources such as popular films and traditional Irish wakes, consists of various singular scenes which have been re-choreographed and re-staged multiple times. Each re-staging utilizes different acting styles and approaches to movement and gesture.

Sullivan's work examines the ways in which the meaning of a particular scene, moment or gesture changes according to the style or mode in which it is choreographed and performed. Sullivan's interests lie less in deconstructing theatrical conventions, than in exploring the transmission of expressive or emotive narrative content, and in examining the territory between art and life.

Catherine Sullivan was born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works. She received a BFA in 1992 from the California Institute of the Arts and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in 1997. The recent exhibition Catherine Sullivan: Five Economies (big hunt / little hunt) was co-organized by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her performance work has been presented at independent venues in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Tokyo. Her video works have been screened at the Vienna Secession, Austria; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany; Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany; 123 Brussels and at the Nouvelles Scenes festival at Le Consortium Art Center in Dijon, France. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut is organizing Catherine Sullivan/ Matrix 149, an exhibition presenting a new video work entitled 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore, on view from 1 March through 27 April. A live performance in the Antheneum's Aetna Theater will accompany the video installation.