By Ann Jarmusch
ARTnews
January 2013
Cecelia Condit
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Madison, Wisconsin
In this exhibition of recent videos and large-scale photographs, all from 2012, Cecelia Condit used lyrical imagery to create fairy-tale narratives about the relationship between humans and the universe. Employing shifts in scale and setting her work in strange, otherworldly landscapes, Condit seems to suggest that people are both powerful and helpless in the face of nature.
Within a Stone’s Throw, a three-channel video projected on a wide museum wall like a shimmering triptych, transported viewers to the once-fertile stretches of Ireland’s Burren Coast, where ancient boulders now guard the bleak shoreline, vines tangle within crumbling castle walls, and time seems to fluctuate. In the video, Condit portrays a nimble innocent who scrambles up and down the region’s limestone hillsides, gathering stones in her billowing skirt. When she throws a pebble, it whizzes through the skies, appears to circle the planet, and returns, miraculously, to her lap.
Read the full review here.
