The exhibition “Heavy Metal” by the artist Chelsea Coon will open in Meno Parkas Gallery (Rotuses sq. 27, Kaunas) on June 13, Thursday, at 6 pm.

The body reacts to frames that are weighted and underpin failures. In her solo exhibition Heavy Metal at Meno Parkas Gallery, Los Angeles-based American artist Chelsea Coon presents recent works that examine the body’s relationship to frameworks and the complications that endurance, desire, and excess pose to the heavy, reinforced edges of steel frames. Through performance, video, photography, and sculpture, she uses repetition to deconstruct structures, contemplating how experiences of endurance address how frames are useful metaphors for forms that force ongoing resilience and failure of the body.

Heavy Metal explores the literal and metaphorical weight of frameworks against the body. The body often endures pre-existing frameworks that rarely indicate signs of falling apart, despite being acted upon. These frameworks are enduring structures that force the body to work. The works in this exhibition explore how the effects of frames impact identity, as the body is always in relation to external factors often beyond its control.

In her performance video grind (2024), Chelsea Coon endures a painstaking attempt to manually break down a steel bed-frame, a particularly loaded symbol for sex and power. In her photographic series forms (2024) and reinforcements (2024), the artist works with lens-based performance, technology, and deconstruction of information to address the persistence of frames that force bodies to operate and move in ordered ways.

Chelsea Coon’s works are weighted with loaded performative elements and look at the dynamic ways gender operates and exists in a complicated tension to factors that impact the messy interrelationship of space and time. She utilizes poetic and material observations as material matter of her works in this minimal, yet poignantly, quiet, and simultaneously gut-wrenching exhibition. The dynamic, multidisciplinary works on view address relational forces of frameworks on the body, time, and space by drawing focus to the edges, barriers, and force of frames, which in their accumulation shape and inform experience.

Chelsea Coon is an American artist born in 1989 and based in Los Angeles. For over a decade, Chelsea Coon’s challenging, boundary breaking works have captivated audiences through performances and exhibitions in galleries, biennials, and festivals. She has premiered over 40 live solo performance artworks in 32 countries and has exhibited extensively across North America, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, and the Middle East. Chelsea Coon is the recipient of the Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grant (New York, 2023), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (New York, 2015), Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography (Boston, 2013), Australian Government Research Training Scholarship (Naarm/Melbourne, 2019-2022), and the Rose Hill Performance Art Award (Boston, 2014). Her work is in private collections and archives in the United States, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Turkey, Norway, United Kingdom, and Chile.

The exhibition is part of Meno Parkas Gallery‘s project „Art Line. 2024“. The project is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Image | Chelsea Coon, big break (2022). Performance to video. Digital. Colour. Sound. 37.17 minutes. Courtesy of the artist