Currently my work is very much performance based dealing with external and internal struggles. Only up until recently have I felt the need to incorporate more subtle ways of how someone struggles.
Kate Gilmore, a performance based artists, also uses the challenges and struggles in her works. Her challenges that she puts forth for herself are usually based around having to maneuver a way out of something while also being filmed. Because her documentation is film, the subject being challenged is revealed to the audience in the rawest form. Both Kate and myself are the subjects of our performance and choose to reveal certain coping methods when faced with problems.
I was first introduced to Kate Gilmore in October of 2007 at Bowe Street when she came as a visiting artist to lecture to the school of the arts. Her style and humor have stayed with my work and me for a couple years now but not until just recently have I started noticing how similar our processes and our intent for are.
Gilmore was born in Washington, D.C. in 1975 and received her B.A. from Bates College in 1997 and her MFA in 2002 at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York. Gilmore has showed at multiple galleries and museums like PS1 in 2005, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Haifa Museum of Art. She has received the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance in New York, New York, the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in 2005, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome to just name a few. Gilmore’s video performances are described as real life predicaments that are “sometimes painful and even potentially dangerous- but ones that she has created for herself” (vcu.edu/arts).
One of Gilmore’s performances that she showed in her lecture at Bowe titled “Cake Walk” follows along with her feminist style. Dressed in yellow and lavender, two feminine colors, Gilmore in roller skates tried to fight her way up a wooden ramp to reach a Bundt cake that is tempting her at the top. Her multiple attempts to make it up the ramp turns into a 10 minute gripping performance that has the audience feeling guilty to laughing all in that small amount of time. Throughout the whole performance there is a flow of blood coming down the ramp, while she is getting beaten and battered with each fall making it difficult for the audience to distinguish blood from the artificial red fluid. In an article from the Catharine Clark Gallery by Kenneth Baker, Gilmore’s “Cake Walk” mimics key parts of womanhood like the menstrual cycle and how it is an existential curse when she added in the flow of “blood” down the ramp. “Much of Gilmore’s work pertains to feminist cultural politics. And “Cake Walk” has an aspect of slapstick feminist critique in the artist’s girlie getup and the indignities her insistent quest for the cake visit upon her”(Baker 2).
This piece in particular is one that I remember seeing most because of how uncomfortable I remember feeling watching it; especially with her being in the room while we viewed it. Gilmore’s ability to affect the viewer that intensely is something that I would like to gain in my work. I am not sure what kind of affect I want to have on my viewer through my performances, but I do know that I want it to have the same lasting effect that Gilmore’s performance has had on me since 2007.
Catharine Clark Gallery Article by Kenneth Baker
Kate Gilmore's Website
VCU's article on Kate
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