Chelsea Knight is a New York based video artist. She recently completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Italy. She is a current resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Her video installations tackle the dynamics of political and social control. Her narratives blend fiction and reality in a singular fluid motion. Her subjects have included professional dancers, military instructors, prison inmates and the artist’s own parents. She encourages her characters to improvise, creating a tension between the personal and the scripted. The artist’s videos examine the ways in which both governmental and domestic forces control our emotional, political and social reality. It is Chelsea’s great strength to lay bear the wires by which humans manipulate and entrap one another. I recently had a chance to stop by her studio in lower Manhattan to chat about her work, recent projects and future plans.