Monday February 6 – Thursday February 9, 11pm PT
Cecelia Condit
Have we met before?
In-Person (February 6 only) and Online
Artist in person — Q&A with the artist follows
Microscope is very pleased to present a solo screening of video works by artist Cecelia Condit. Condit will be in attendance and available for a Q&A after the screening. The event will also take place online with a live introduction and Q&A.
The program includes eight videos made by Condit between 1981 through 2021, from her first “Beneath the Skin” originally shot on 3/4” U-matic tape, to her latest digital video piece “AI and I.”
Condit has described her work as “feminist fairy tales” manifesting through childish naivety on the dark sides of womanhood. Often approaching unsettling subjects and traumatic events imposed on women such as stalking, domestic violence, and back-alley abortions, Condit reaffirms female agency and independence through the use of imaginative settings, soundtracks, and narration.
Condit’s videos, especially in her earlier works, stream together dense edits of shots composed through inventive experimental techniques, which often allude to fragmented mental realms or collapse the depth of the video’s three-dimensional space: film projection of faces projected onto the actual faces of the characters, super 8mm projections onto walls or bed sheets reshot and re-elaborated through analog video, cardboard printouts of the characters crawled by worms or catching fire.
The visual material is interwoven through masterful voiceover and brief sessions of deceptively simple original songs using sounds reminiscent of toy keyboard presets, or recordings of female choirs harmonizing Condit’s lyrics.
Her influential 1983 video “Possibly in Michigan,” which recently gained viral attention on TikTok, as well as her 2020 encyclopedic musical “I’ve Been Afraid,” among others, address the violence against women and their subversion of the imposed role of victims. Throughout both videos, music plays a pivotal role in articulating her seemingly innocent, yet psychologically complex narrative.
Abortion rights are addressed in Condit’s 2019 work “We are Hardly more than Children.” The artist recounts the trauma of her friend’s illegal abortion through a collage of footage new and old, and through the images of her friend’s revelatory paintings.
In her most recent single-channel video “AI & I,” Condit builds a fantasy journey upon her real-life conversations with Alexa testing the limits of artificial intelligence.
The artist will be in attendance for the Q&A with the audience which will follow the screening at 9pm ET.
Online General Admission $9 (Valid through Thursday February 9, 11pm ET)
Online Member Admission $7 (Valid through Thursday February 9, 11pm ET)
General in-person admission $10
Member in-person admission $8
Please note: Masks are required for this event.
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Cecelia Condit has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Walker Art Center in MN, and Centre Georges Pompidou Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous festival awards, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
