Lift
lamp, plexiglass, feathers, light bulb
2009
24" x 48" x 12"
What's your work about right now?
> Indexes of endurance, absent spankers, mechanized logics and confused circuits. We know what is going on but we do not know for what this is going. In my video, installation, drawing, and performance work, there is transparency in both materials used and in what is occurring; my art is not magic. Not magical in the sense that most elements are recognizable in the pieces. However, their immediate purpose is not evident. Rather, I am opening up ways of looking, of expectation, and of hiding. I create the option for not knowing. Just as looking is not the same as knowing, desire is no longer desire if you achieve its object; we do not look down at the doorknob we are using it until it does not work, or until something out of the ordinary occurs. Expectations do not have to be fulfilled; I am looking to confront our desire for meaning.
Who are your influences?
> From histories of flying machines to Absurdist Theater, my practice is deeply rooted in material and literary investigations.
Where do you go to come up with imagery?
> I am a hoarder when it comes to both materials and research. I generally spend a year or so gathering books, images, language, etc from libraries, movies, and locations that I then sit and play with over a period of time.
and maybe tell a story if you want...whatever.
>This is the text for my solo at Julius Caesar “False Starts and Close Calls”
“To contend against the air, one must be specifically heavier than the air. All that is not absurd is possible. All that is possible may be accomplished.”
M. Nadar, on human flight, 1863
Just as mythologies of the stars were created to open up the unexplainable, there should be room in art for different approaches to opening. Like flying, art is a leap of faith, a denial of disbelief, an opening of possibility. From flying machines and hot air balloons to kites and jets, if you are lucky or skilled enough to manage to become airborne, you stand to gain a view of the world from a whole new perspective. But this vantage point from above is not necessarily an entirely optimistic one. As soon as the Wright brothers took their first successful flight in 1903, modern warfare gained a whole new dimension of bombing and surveillance. Of course, our obsession with flight predates the Wright brothers, whether mechanical or imaginary, perhaps partly because flight is a metaphor for journey. And the container for this journey is air.
My proposed installation of False Starts and Close Calls, a failed journey of sorts, is also about an attempt to make sense out of the puzzle of the world around us. The Sky Is Falling be both the moment before take-off and the instant after a fall, still and in motion. cruel and comedic.
Additionally, here is my bio
>
Madeleine Bailey is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who utilizes video, installation, drawing, and performance in her work. Bailey holds an A.B. from Brown University in Providence, RI and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She received a MFA Fellowship from SAIC in addition to the Weston Fine Arts Award, the Karen T. Romer Fellowship, and the Minnie Helen Hicks Award for Excellence in Art from Brown University. Bailey has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in places such as Scott Projects, Concertina, and Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, as well as The LAB in San Francisco and the Centre International d'Art Contemporain in Pont-Aven, France. She has upcoming exhibitions and events in Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center, Julius Caesar, and Eel Space.
Website:
www.madeleinebailey.com
Summoning Ground (Installation View)
HD video, 1:45 loop with sound, monitor, platform, wires
2009
interview by Sara Heymann, sara@thechicagogrid.com
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