Cortney Andrews “Echoes”
Marinaro
This event has ended.
To spin the web and not be caught in it…to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
– Rebecca Solnit
Marinaro presents Echoes, a solo exhibition by Cortney Andrews, inhabiting both gallery spaces.
Andrews creates cinematic videos, performances, and photographs that investigate physical and psychological thresholds. In her new body of work Echoes, the artist reflects upon the sensuality and brutality of relationship patterns. Through performance with a group of dancers, Andrews incorporates everyday domestic props including laundry lines, bed sheets, curtains and fans. Conceived over the past two years, the dancers perform the conflicting experiences of entanglement and liberation, composure and combustion, endurance and resistance. The exhibition consists of two video installations and a pair of photographs.
In the central video, Andrews’ performers move behind rows of hanging sheets, visible only by their hands, as they slide the fabric to block or invite the viewer in further. When the web of fabric falls away, sheets are thrown in the air only to frantically be pulled back down and wrapped into their chests. This scene is interlaced with clips of a female dancer entangled by the group. The group’s actions fluctuate between protection and violence, as the woman becomes increasingly desensitized. In the final scene, the camera floats over the performers’ resting bodies as they begin to rise up and crash down, echoing the motion of waves. Their forward procession continues to gain momentum.
In the same room, rows of colored sheets hang on lines that serve as a divider between the videos. The sheets reference women’s domestic labor and the artist’s childhood in rural Kansas, as well as performance itself – a theatrical curtain, a veil, that covers the performers’ bodies as they change or move “offstage”. But there is no offstage for Andrews, in both the video and the performance, the physical labor is visible.
Beyond the sheets in the back gallery is a second video installation. In this work, titled Memento Mori in Movement, we see a woman alone on a small stage moving with intensity— jumping, panting, falling, spinning, literally bouncing off the walls and floors. The window behind her opens onto the elevated train platform in Brooklyn, a stark contrast to the female performer, whose movement resembles that of a caged animal.
Two photographs are presented alongside the video works. In both images, the artist’s cropped torso is seen framed in a mirror. A crack in the mirror cuts across the nude body like the incision scar that is visible just below her belly. While the two images appear similar, their reflective surface, frame and cropping are distinct: one photograph requires the physical proximity and shadow of the viewer to reveal itself—the more it is covered, the more it is exposed.
In Echoes, the artist questions the appearances and perceptions of relationships, both interpersonally and through one’s inner dialogue. The video, photography and performance in the exhibition simulate what is felt but not always seen, what is seen but not always felt, and the acts of projection, reflection and repetition.
Cortney Andrews (b. 1983, Emporia, Kansas) is an artist working in video, choreography, and performance. Andrews received her MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014 and Yaddo in 2013. Andrews has exhibited in London, throughout the US including New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles. She has staged performances at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and Jack Hanley Gallery, and is the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant for Performance Art, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, and the NY City Artist Corps Grant. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She is also the Co-Founder and Director of Offshore Residency, a traveling artists residency program on a sailboat. Andrews currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Media
Schedule
from October 04, 2022 to October 15, 2022
Performance: Thursday, October 6, 7pm