"Don't Tread on Me" Three Channel Video installation. Performance still, Momenta Art, 2011 (Photo: Alesia Exum)

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. Continue Reading More »

Photo: Javier Cambre

On a chilly December evening in Williamsburg, I stepped into Momenta Art, with audiences huddled around a solo dancer, trancelike, swaying her body as if she’s a tree. Her gazeless eyes told us that she moved according to the music, the surroundings, and her intuition. It was a dance movement which I haven’t seen since my days in Japan — Butoh. The minimally dark installations by Nina Lola Bachhuber provided a surreal universe to the performance artist/dancer Pamela Herron. Continue Reading More »