Caitlin Baucom
Caitlin Baucom
ARTIST STATEMENT
i imagine that yes is the only living thing -e.e. cummings
Exquisite pleasure in fucking the ordinary moment. Love burns, the high flush of fever, invaded body shaking and short of breath. Eyes closed, plastered hair, twitching hips, saying yes.
Where throngs of people would avert their eyes from displays of pleasure and abdications of good health, turn the gaze back on. Embracing immediacy and pleasure, exposing despised young bodies, sick, indulgent, non productive.
My performance work takes from the floridity of opera, the pointed opacity of poetry, the indulgence and critical engagement of visual art performance. Calling upon the name of opera and its anatomy for a historic dedication to risk taking, sexual folly, dangerous love, I compose performances scored with electronic music; scoffing at the fear and social complacency which keep the experimental at bay, I imagine deviances, criminal, Romantic and otherwise, to explode cozy Philistine models and the anesthetized capitalism which advertises them.
BIO
Caitlin Baucom received her MFA in Performance from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and BA from The Evergreen State College. Her interdisciplinary performances indulge freely in divergent musical, poetic, performance and visual/technological practices. Recent performances and screenings include Chicago’s Defibrillator Gallery, Links Hall, and High Concept Laboratories; The Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana; Verge Fair, Miami Beach, Florida; Stockholm Fringe Festival, Stockholm, Sweden; and Dimanche Rouge Festival in Paris, France. In 2013 she is in residence at Soho20 Gallery in Manhattan, and the International Artist-in-Residence of the ACC Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar, Germany.
Selig, 2013, 9 minutes So Very Alive, Rumble Arts Center, Chicago IL
Ecstatic, blessed, blissed. Terror on the tongue, toward the Other and the Other and the Other, werewolf fantasm.
Sick, 2012, 3 hours MDW Fair, Chicago IL & Verge Art Fair, Miami Beach FL
A tubercular fantasy, the high flush of fever, invaded body quivering with sick cells and short of breath. Eyes closed, plastered hair, twitching hips, saying yes. Embracing infirmity, an imposed and romantic time out; exposing despised young bodies, sick, indulgent, non productive. A performative installation.
Scena, 2012, 15 minutes IMPACT MFA Performance Festival, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL
The animated figures stand adorning every public street, and seem to breathe in stone, or move their marble feet.
A Pygmalion perversion, the last in a series of works in which a performer dedicated her body to me as raw material after reaching stagnation in her own practice. For a year she has been the passive but willing and pleasured recipient of my performative actions. In Scena, I kill off her petrified parts, in order to begin to bring her back to life.
Blue Material, 2012, 30 minutes Dimanche Rouge #19, La Rotonde, Paris, France
A performative installation, bodily disjunct, 3 faces, 3 hands, one voice. A slow attempt at splintering and finding one’s way back.
Higher, 2012, 9 minutes Midwinter, Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago IL
Higher is constructed from one song with an extended dream sequence in the middle, a la 20s and 30s musicals. From extreme highs to extreme lows, I perform on and around an installed set, which includes a scarred and lovely body.
Roses, 2011, 12 minutes, High Concept Laboratories, Chicago, IL and Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago IL
An operetta of mythical female romance. Bodily inter-actions performed by me to, on and with another performer, to a score harvested from sound effects, scraps of subconscious song and altered familiarity, and unabashedly evocative songscapes.