Cecelia Condit

Last updated
Cecelia Condit
Cecelia Condit.jpg
Condit in June 2017
Born1947
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Video Artist and Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee [1]
Years active1981–present
Known for Short film, surrealist film
Notable workPossibly in Michigan

Not a Jealous BoneAnnie LloydPulling Up RootsWe Were Hardly More Than Children

Contents

I'm Not Afraid

Cecelia Condit (born 1947) is an American video artist. Condit's films are noted for their attempts to subvert traditional mythologies of female representation and psychologies of sexuality and violence.

Condit has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Mary L. Nohl Foundation, Wisconsin Arts Council and National Media Award from the Retirement Research Foundation. Her work has been shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. In 2008, Condit had her first solo show exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation in New York. [2]

Early life and education

Condit was born in Philadelphia in 1947. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. She received a BFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and a MFA in photography from Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

Career

Condit served as professor and director of the graduate program in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. [3] Her work received renewed attention in 2015 after her short film Possibly in Michigan was posted to Reddit. [4] Four years later, an audio clip from the same film became a viral hit on TikTok, with over 22,000 iterations created as of July 2019. [5]

Works

Beneath The Skin

Beneath the Skin is her first work. A short film, it follows a woman's thoughts and musings towards a recent incident in which she discovered that her boyfriend was hiding the body of his ex-girlfriend in his closet.

It is based on a real-life incident that occurred in Condit's life when she dated Ira Einhorn, also known as the Unicorn Killer. Ira had murdered his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and hidden her corpse in his closet. [6] Condit, who began dating Einhorn, never found Maddux's corpse due to being on medication that hindered her sense of smell. [7]

The film can be found on Condit's personal YouTube channel.


Videography

Year [8] Title
1981 Beneath the Skin [9]
1983 Possibly in Michigan
1987Not a Jealous Bone
1996Suburbs of Eden
1990/2008Oh, Rapunzel
2003Why Not a Sparrow
2004All About a Girl
2005Little Spirits
2008Annie Lloyd
2015Pulling Up Roots
2016Some Dark Place
2017Pizzly Bear
2019We Were Hardly More Than Children
2020I've Been Afraid
2021AI and I

Select Installations

Condit has created a number of video installations including:

Personal life

Condit has two grown sons, Schuyler Vogel, the chaplain at Carleton College, and Lloyd Vogel, chief executive officer at Garage Grown Gear.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ira Einhorn</span> American murderer (1940–2020)

Ira Samuel Einhorn, known as "The Unicorn Killer", was an American environmental activist and convicted murderer. His moniker, "the Unicorn", was derived from his surname; Einhorn means "unicorn" in German. As an environmental activist, Einhorn was a speaker at the first Earth Day event in Philadelphia in 1970. On September 9, 1977, Einhorn's ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux disappeared following a trip to collect her belongings from the apartment she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eighteen months later, police found her partially decomposed body in a trunk in Einhorn's closet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marco Brambilla</span> Italian-Canadian director

Marco Brambilla is an Italian-born Canadian contemporary artist and film director, known for re-contextualizations of popular and found imagery, and use of 3D imaging technologies in public installations and video art.

Rebecca Horn is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. She directed the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom (1990). Horn presently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Feingold</span> Artist

Kenneth Feingold is a contemporary American artist based in New York City. He has been exhibiting his work in video, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and installations since 1974. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2003) and has taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, among others. His works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pipilotti Rist</span> Swiss contemporary artist

Pipilotti Elisabeth Rist is a Swiss visual artist best known for creating experimental video art and installation art. Her work is often described as surreal, intimate, abstract art, having a preoccupation with the female body. Her artwork is often categorized as feminist art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Madison Museum of Contemporary Art</span> Art museum in Madison, Wisconsin

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an independent, non-profit art museum located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Lucier</span> American artist

Mary Lucier is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Yuan & Peng Yu</span> Chinese conceptual artists

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are Chinese conceptual artists whose work has a reputation for being confrontational and provocative. They have lived and worked collaboratively in Beijing since the late 1990s.

Beryl Korot is an American visual artist. Her practice includes video installation, weaving, paper tapestries, digital embroidery, and drawings.

Jim Campbell is a contemporary San Francisco based artist who is known for his LED light works. Campbell began his artistic career in film making but switched to electronic sculpture in 1990 and started making his iconic LED matrix works in 2000. His current work combines film, sound, and LED light installations.

Camomile Hixon is an American visual artist whose primary medium is glitter and paint on canvas. Her works range from large-scale installations and environments to The Search for the Missing Unicorn, an interactive street art project that has reached over 120 countries.

Amy Jenkins is an American artist from Peterborough, New Hampshire who is recognized for her work in video installation and experimental film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sherry Millner</span> American artist

Sherry Millner is an American artist working primarily in video. She has also worked in photography and installation art.

Frank Gillette is an American video and installation artist. Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments". His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art. In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.

Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, installation, and performance. Perry's work investigates "blackness, black femininity, African American heritage" and the portrayal or representation of black people throughout history, focusing on how blackness influences technology and image making. Perry explores the duality of intelligence and seductiveness in the contexts of black family heritage, black history, and black femininity. "Perry is committed to net neutrality and ideas of collective production and action, using open source software to edit her work and leasing it digitally for use in galleries and classrooms, while also making all her videos available for free online. This principle of open access in Perry's practice aims to privilege black life, to democratize access to art and culture, and to offer a critical platform that differentiates itself from the portrayal of blackness in the media". For Perry, blackness is a technology which creates fissures in systems of surveillance and control and thus creates inefficiency as an opportunity for resistance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia L. Montgomery</span> American visual artist

Virginia L. Montgomery, also known as VLM, is an American multimedia artist working in video art, sound art, sculpture, performance, and illustration. She has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe at museums, galleries, and film festivals. Her artwork is known for its surrealist qualities, material experimentation, and thematic blending of science, mysticism, metaphysics, and 21st century feminist autobiography.

Possibly in Michigan is a 1983 American musical horror short film written and directed by Cecelia Condit, with music by Karen Skladany, who starred in the film as Janice. The film follows two women looking for perfumes in a department store being stalked by a cannibalistic murderer wearing a mask.

Heather Goodchild is a Canadian artist and costume designer who produces paintings and textile art installations. She has exhibited in Berlin, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Toronto and throughout Canada. Recurring themes in her work include symbolism, rituals, regalia, societies, traditions, morality, and personal fulfilment.

Beneath the Skin is a 1981 short film created by Cecelia Condit. It follows a woman's thoughts and musings towards a recent incident in which she discovered that her boyfriend was hiding the body of his ex-girlfriend in his closet.

Geo Rutherford is an American artist, educator, and TikToker based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She considers herself to be a hobbyist limnologist.

References

  1. "Faculty & Staff Directory". Peck School of the Arts. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
  2. "Cecelia Condit". CUE Art Foundation. Retrieved 2019-08-13.
  3. "Cecelia Condit | Peck School of the Arts".
  4. "Possibly the creepiest thing I've ever watched". 30 April 2015.
  5. "Cecelia Condit's Video Art is Going Viral on TikTok". 22 July 2019.
  6. "Who Was the 'Unicorn Killer'? How a 1960s Activist-Turned-Murderer Evaded Extradition for 23 Years". Inside Edition. 2020-04-09.
  7. Breda, Alix (2017-11-29). "Cecelia Condit's Body of Becoming: Women and the Dark Forest of Dreams". Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal. Retrieved 2023-09-19.
  8. "VIDEO". Cecelia Condit. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  9. Popkin (2021-11-27). ""Beneath The Skin" by Ceclia Condit combines true crime and art in an unforgettable way". Boing Boing. Retrieved 2023-10-01.
  10. "North Dakota Museum Of Art | past 2010 cecelia condit". www.ndmoa.com. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  11. "Cecelia Condit: Within a Stone's Throw". Nevada Museum of Art. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  12. "PHOTOGRAPHY". Cecelia Condit. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  13. "Women, Nature, Science: Cecelia Condit: Tales of a Future Past". www.lyndensculpturegarden.org. 2016-07-12. Retrieved 2022-01-04.