Critical Writing Index

Lost in the Badlands

by Kerrie Welsh

Welsh provides an overview of CUE Art Foundation's retrospective of Cecelia Condit's video work. Describing Condit's early videos as unnerving and pushing boundaries between dream and reality, documentary and fiction,Welsh draws parallels between Condit and artists Laura Kipnis, Dara Birnbaum, Vanalyne Green, and Jane C. Finley in their postmodern feminist approach to pop culture conventions.

Condit's middle period is marked by aesthetic motifs of superimpositions, still images, and unusual camera angles, echoing the reappearance of thematic specters - mummies, masks, her mother, generational stories, and the mundane becoming terrifying.

Condit lists Leslie Thornton and Mary Lucier as influences, the former for her hyper-real questioning of documentary truth, the latter for her visuals of the female body in natural landscapes.

ITEM 2013.156 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Beneath the SkinCecelia Condit

Possibly Michigan

Not a Jealous Bone

Oh, Rapunzel

Why Not A Sparrow

All About a Girl

Little Spirits

Annie Lloyd