Susan Cianciolo “RUN PRAYER, RUN CAFÉ, RUN LIBRARY”

Bridget Donahue

This event has ended.

RUN PRAYER, RUN CAFÉ, RUN LIBRARY, Cianciolo’s second exhibition with Bridget Donahue, coincides with a simultaneous exhibition entitled RUN church, RUN Restaurant, Run Store, on view September 1-30 at Modern Art gallery, London. The exhibitions are divided between London and New York as two halves of a single body. And the body, a machine operating on its own axis of timing and digestion, is at the center of the two installations separated by an ocean.

Each side of the Atlantic is split into two distinct time zones; while it is night in New York, it is dawn in England. As Susan worked to build these six houses, three in each gallery - her mind assumed two locations. One mirrors the other around the clock.

At 99 Bowery, tent-like structures fill the room. All three are inhabitable - one is a café serving tea and light treats. A second room is a library filled with handmade and collected books, and thirdly, a prayer room sits hedged in by rocks and plants. The life-size tents are open utilitarian constructions with tapestried interiors, tall and wide enough to house people who wish to enter. They recall Cianciolo’s small cardboard box kits from her first exhibition at Bridget Donahue, those that housed polaroids taken with her friends, drawings made with her daughter, and garments to be completed by the wearer.

RUN PRAYER is a place that, grounded in house plants and botanicals, brings to mind a quiet question, “Am I of my body?” And to an extent all the tents provoke the same question. Gallery visitors enter the capsules as performers who ingest written words, the tea, the garment sketches of figures at work, play, and rest. The tents need humans to exist for their interiors to function, though conversely the houses suggest an ascetic self-containment. One can sense that they were made in isolation.

The structures ask that the participants give themselves over to the experience of being inside. “Am I located anywhere within this body?”

Text by Erin Leland

Susan Cianciolo was born in 1969 in Providence, RI, and she lives and works in New York City. From 1995–2001 Cianciolo produced her critically-acclaimed collection RUN. More recently, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Yale Union, Portland, OR, USA (2016); 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2016); Bridget Donahue, New York, NY, USA (2015); and Alleged Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2001). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (2017); The Swiss Institute, New York, NY, USA (2016); Interstate Projects, New York, NY, USA (2016); White Columns, New York, NY, USA (2016); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, USA (2015); and Portikus Museum, Frankfurt, Germany.