The body is always acting and reacting to factors in and beyond its control. In Coon’s first solo exhibition star-spangled, she presents recent works of endurance and excess to examine the body’s shifting relationship to space, and how failure can be understood as a metaphor for the body itself. Through performance to video, photography, and text-based drawings Coon questions the ways in which endurance’s felt effects are experienced differently in each work on physical and psychological levels through extreme repetition, and duration. Of this, her performative works each look at the dynamic ways gender operates and exists in a complicated tension to factor of space and time. She asserts that performance can shift perspectives through examining phases, distance, points, mirroring, and the way in which the body is composed of, and situated within, continuously shifting space.
Chelsea Coon (b. 1989 United States) is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the shifting interconnections of the body, time, and space. She utilises endurance to reconsider limits of the body primarily through performance as well as installation, sculpture, painting, photography, video, and text. She has exhibited internationally in festivals, biennales, and galleries in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She received her BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012), MFA at Tufts University (2014), and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Theatre, Performance and Contemporary Live Arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Scuola Teatro Dimitri, Switzerland (2015). Recent writings included her essay ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love: Transference, Pain, Endurance’ in Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (Ohio State University Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography (2013), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2015), and the Australian Research Training Program Scholarship (2019-2022). Coon is a PhD candidate in practice-led research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.