More About the Artist

Trained in both acting and visual art, Catherine Sullivan works simultaneously in the theater and the gallery space. As an acting student she created original theater pieces that she wrote, designed, and directed, and later as an art student she incorporated video and photography into her practice. Through her long-standing association with fringe theater in Chicago and Los Angeles, she continues to work on theater and performance projects, which often accompany her exhibition in galleries and museums.

'Tis a pity She's a Fluxus Whore (2003), a two-screen film installation, exemplifies Sullivan's approach. First presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, the dual projection documents a restaging of two events: a performance of John Ford's seventeenth-century Restoration play, presented at the Wadsworth in 1943, and a 1964 Fluxus performance festival held in Aachen, Germany. Sullivan's actors were filmed in the same locations as the original, but in reverse: her Fluxus artists were filmed in Hartford and Fordean protagonists in Germany. This gesture recalls Bertolt Brecht's work and makes literal the artifice of theatrical space.

Five Economies (big hunt/ little hunt) (2002) incorporates a kaleidoscopic array of acting styles and scenes from well-known films. Big Hunt Draws on the films Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Miracle Worker, Persona, Tim, and Marat/ Sade; the real-life story of Birdie Jo Hoaks, a woman who disguised herself as a young boy in order to collect welfare benefits; and the traditional Irish wake amusements, in which participants would often play physically rough games with each other. Each was chosen to illustrate Elias Canetti's claim, in Crowds and Power, that power relationships stem from humans' past as both hunter an prey. Actors chosen by Sullivan, filmed in black and white, randomly switch roles as the vignettes slide by, variously communicating hysteria, melancholy, or stoicism solely through silent physical gesture, never producing a final narrative resolution.

In little hunt, the actors and styles are relatively static; an overweight male trained as a ballroom dancer stands across a tennis court from a female postmodern dancer. However, the setting and the sense of time are askew, as the actors navigate a selection of props from Les Miserables and daylight and nighttime abruptly flip-flop during the film. The vivid interaction between big hunt's actors in counterbalanced by the relative isolation of those in little hunt.

By rendering multiple permutations of each scene, assigning several actors to the same lines, and choosing source materials that are already part of a cultural lexicon, Sullivan atomizes the "total experience" usually offered in a theatrical production. Picking up the pieces and interrogating them, she emphasized repeated acts of transformation and the uncertainty they generate.

This text is excerpted from the Whitney Biennial 2004 Exhibition catalogue.