UbuWeb Film & Video: Cheryl Donegan

Head (1993, 2:49 min, color, sound)

Cheryl Donegan defines a generation of artists, many of whom are women, who burst onto the scene in the 1990s with a new conceptual art practice. Donegan's work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Direct, irreverent, and infused with an ironic eroticism, Donegan's works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making, and art history.

In a series of provocative tapes that define a new mode of video performance, Donegan creates exercises in masquerade, role-playing, and exposure. Using her own body as metaphor, she executes performative actions before the camera; these conceptual performances often result in or relate to process paintings and drawings.

Donegan's works draw from a panoply of pop cultural and art historical references, from Jean-Luc Godard to the Beach Boys, from punk music to Barnett Newman's "zips" and Pollock's splatter paintings. In her paintings, performances, and installations, Donegan often refers to the processes of art-making in the context of art history, including high Modernism and Abstract Expressionism.

Cheryl Donegan was born in 1962 in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York. She was an artist-in-residence at ART/OMI, and Banff Center for Fine Arts, Alberta, Canada. Her tapes have been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and festivals including the 1995 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; White Columns, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New York Film and Video Festival; 1993 Venice Biennale; Galerie Rizzo, Paris; the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Donegan had one-person shows at Lotta Hammer, London; Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C.; Basilico Fine Arts and the Elizabeth Koury Gallery, New York; and has had solo exhibitions in Nice, Paris, Berlin, and Milan. She lives in New York.

These titles are available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials.