Video Art @ Conduit

BIOGRAPHY
Carolyn Sortor is a self-taught media-based artist whose first video was shown in the 2000 Texas Show. In 2004, she purchased a B.F.A. from Ben Britt (who received it from U. Texas at Austin in 1983 but wasn't using it anyway.) Since then, her work has been exhibited in Dallas, Austin, Marfa, New York, and San Francisco and broadcast on Current TV. Her best-known work is her Matthew Barney parody, Creamistress 6: The Centered Polenta, which was highlighted by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker out of a show of work by 30 artists. She has assisted with curating for the Dallas Video Festival since 2004, and in 2007 co-curated with Danette Dufilho a series of video art programs out of the Video Association's archives. She maintains a blog on art, politics and trash, and has authored a not-so-miniature Shakespeare festival for book clubs. She has been a commercial real estate lawyer since 1987.

Carolyn Sortor's main website, through which her Creamistress Online Catalogue, A ShakeFest for Book Clubs, and other projects can be reached, is at http://www.c-cyte.com

Her blog is at http://c-cyte.blogspot.com

In "From Screen to Gallery: Cinema, Video, and Installation Art Practices," John Hanhardt writes, “[l]ike photography, media-based art—art utilizing film, video, and/or related technologies—had to struggle to gain legitimacy, but by the late twentieth century it emerged as a prominent and powerful creative force” (American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Summer 2008).

Artists today are addressing many of the same issues they've always been concerned with. Much of the media-based work I've seen during the last few years digs deeply into issues relating to personal identity, social governance and control, and how the histories we're told shape our future.

Arguably, both our readiness and our need for more insightful, complex, and nuanced understandings of these same issues are greater than ever, because of recent technological developments – extreme plastic surgery, genetic modification, cloning, virtual identities (avatars, etc.), psychotropic cocktails, computers as our brain prostheses, technologies for identifying and tracking individuals and for psychological manipulation, the replacement of the physical public square with virtual facilities owned by private corporations (one result being that our data, personal pages, opinions, even our collective history can be sold, deleted, or modified with a keystroke), the growth in the sheer volume of historical and other information we're now able to store and accumulate, the potential obsolescence of borders, now that people can sort themselves into virtual nations and multi-national corporations control the movement of both jobs and workers, etc.

Because video and other media-based works are time-based and comprise many frames per second, as well as audio that can include words, music, and other sounds, these media can encompass, organize, and convey vast amounts of data on many levels; they are up to the task of expressing complex information – in ways that only art can – about the conditions we now face; and many artists today seem interested in deploying these media fully.

I've wanted to see an exhibition like this in Dallas – or anywhere – for years; and I'm extremely excited that we've managed to assemble this quantity and quality of work. We hope you'll find these works enjoyable or aesthetically satisfying. I hope you'll also find that attending to them closely enriches your understanding of our world and the challenges ahead.