Cecelia Condit: Tales of a Future Past Opens March 4 at Lynden
Condit's exhibition at Lynden reflects her increasing interest in landscape and the natural world.
Cecelia Condit, Tales of a Future Past (2017), video still.
Cecelia Condit: Tales of a Future Past opens at the Lynden Sculpture Garden on Saturday, March 4, 2017 with a reception from 3 to 5 pm. The fifth in a series of occasional exhibitions entitled Women, Nature, Science, Tales of a Future Past includes Condit’s most recent video installation, as well as photographs and an earlier video, World. A publication with an essay by Sally Berger will be available for purchase. The exhibition remains on view through Sunday, June 25, 2017. The Lynden Sculpture Garden is located at 2145 West Brown Deer Road, Milwaukee, WI 53217. The reception is free and open to the public.
Fear and displacement are central to Cecelia Condit’s work, which dissects the entanglements that connect self, society, and the natural world. Condit is a storyteller, particularly of psychologically inflected contemporary fairy tales, whose work–like all the best fairy tales–oscillates between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty. Her videos document the frailty of personal identity in the face of the primordial unknown that sits just outside the frame, a charged space loaded with irony and danger.
Condit’s exhibition at Lynden reflects her increasing interest in landscape and the natural world. Her most recent two-channel installation, Tales of a Future Past (2017), explores extinction through the story of a lone giraffe who collects small animal forms that evoke treasured memories, hope, innocence, and grief. When an aggressive zebra crosses her path, the giraffe’s fragile world is threatened. In Tales, Condit considers time and space in relation to landscape and our planet, moving from the insistently personal to the universal, and from fairy tale to myth. Also on view will be her 2012 video, World, and virtuosic photographs that subvert scale and time to create imaginary landscapes.
About the Artist
Cecelia Condit has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous awards including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation‘s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists. She is currently a professor in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
About the Lynden Sculpture Garden
The Lynden Sculpture Garden offers a unique experience of art in nature through its collection of more than 50 monumental sculptures sited across 40 acres of park, lake and woodland. The sculpture garden is open to art and nature lovers of all ages Fridays through Wednesdays, 10 am-5 pm (closed Thursdays). Admission to the sculpture garden is $9 for adults and $7 for students and seniors; children under 6 and members are free. Annual memberships are also available.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
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A serious topic which looks, from the stills in this article, to be presented in an amusing fashion! I’ve always admired Cecelia Condit’s films.