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July 15, 2012 to February 24, 2013 |
Brody Condon: To prove her zeal one woman ate mud.
Brody Condon’s work often addresses the over-identification with fantasy prevalent in American culture. With that in mind, Condon designs performances that utilize live action role-playing techniques whereby he creates and populates temporary communes. While living at the fictionalized site, the group critically explores these issues in an experiential manner. For his exhibitions, Condon records on video these unscripted and often disorienting interactions, documenting them in an ethnographic style.
To prove her zeal one woman ate mud. was a small, week-long communal situation conceived specifically for this project, located inside a seven-story mill tower and nearby farm in the town of Wassaic, New York. The process combined elements from unorthodox 1940s American monastic communities, group encounter techniques such as Gestalt Therapy, and contemporary science fiction. Imagining themselves inhabiting an ecologically sustainable space station, the characters engaged in daily group therapy sessions led by an elusive artificial intelligence embodied by an abstract sculpture, which the artist inserted into the action as a non-human player. The video projection on view at The Aldrich presents the artist’s documentation of this fictional world, while the second video makes public for the first time Condon’s collaborative performance workshop procedures and process.
Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Curator
Brody Condon: To prove her zeal one woman ate mud. is part of united states, a semester of solo exhibitions and artist’s projects that approach both the nature of the United States as a country and “united states” as the notion of uniting separate forms, entities, or conditions of being. Timed to coincide with the 2012 American election season, united states also includes solo exhibitions by Pedro Barbeito, Jonathan Brand, Brad Kahlhamer, Brian Knep, Erik Parker, and Hank Willis Thomas, and projects by Jane Benson, Alison Crocetta, Celeste Fichter, Erika Harrsch, Nina Katchadourian, Matthew Northridge, Risa Puno, John Stoney, Sui Jianguo, Frances Trombly, Rosemary Williams, and Jenny Yurshanksy.
