ART CITIES:N.York-Cheryl Donegan

Cheryl Donegan is one of the voices in contemporary art whose work frequently moves between the worlds of video and painting. She is especially well known for a series of video works from the early ’90s, including “Head” and “Kiss My Royal Irish Ass” that were blistering attacks on the dominant paradigms of the female body in art and other issues of art politics.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive

Working across video, painting, and performance, Cheryl Donegan explores the production and consumption of images in popular culture, contemporary vernacular architecture, and art history. In her performance and video work spanning the early ’90s to the early ’00s, Donegan often used her body as an apparatus for mark-making, parodying the conventions of commercials and music videos while considering the politics of self-representation. Over the last decade, she has continued her exploration of the mediated image and her interests in surface, compressed space, and the indexical relation of the mark to the body in paintings and sculptures produced in her studio as well as in videos distributed on social media. Her exhibition “Scenes and Commercials”, tackle the ways and means by which our connections to the past are produced, fabricated, and renewed, particularly in fashion and art history. The artist presents works from throughout her career, bringing together key projects that have been generative of new pieces in her oeuvre. Throughout the exhibition, the Resource Center will serve as a concept store that will display garments, drawings, prints, and textiles Donegan has produced alongside items she has sourced from websites such as eBay, engaging in a process of “Refashioning the Readymade.”

Info: Curator: Johanna Burton, Assistant Curator: Sara O’Keeffe, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 20/1-16/4/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org