time froze (2021)

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Chelsea Coon
time froze (2021)
Performance to video. 3.41 of 9.03 minutes.
Digital. Colour. Sound.
Courtesy of the artist.

In a precarious position I consume video footage shot on my mobile device that depicts an edge of the Great Salt Lake in Corinne, Utah during my last trip to the United States in 2019. While I am not able to physically travel back there now, this site is able to be revisited through my memory of the experience which is in part accessed through this video document. My memory is complicated by my repetitive viewing of the recording, which performatively manifests in my attempts to hold challenging postures that apply significant pressure to points on my upper and lower back, and further, my perception is challenged from the sensation of blood rushing in my head as it hangs upside down. This precarity aims to articulate something of what it feels like to oscillate between loss and desire. The excessive viewing of this landscape video has permitted a new memory to take form which is inextricably linked to remembering how it felt to be there, and how it feels now to bear witness to a moment frozen in time from a distanced position.

Chelsea Coon is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the shifting interconnections of the body, time, and space. She utilises endurance to reconsider limits of the body primarily through performance as well as installation, sculpture, painting, photography, video, and text. She has exhibited internationally in festivals, biennales, and galleries in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She received her BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012), MFA at Tufts University (2014), and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Theatre, Performance and Contemporary Live Arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Scuola Teatro Dimitri, Switzerland (2015). Recent writings included her essay ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love: Transference, Pain, Endurance’ in Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (Ohio State University Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the Australian Research Training Program Scholarship and is a PhD candidate in practice-led research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

*This performance was developed for the online exhibition „Utah Sites: Performance Art in Utah Landscapes“ curated by Kristina Lenzi and hosted by Utah Division of Arts & Museums (Salt Lake City, United States).