Catherine Sullivan

Still from Triangle of Need, 2007
Multi-channel video installation
Collection of Miami Art Museum, gift of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros

Catherine Sullivan's works are truly hybrid, freely crossing boundaries and mixing disciplines, while providing completely immersive visual and aural environments. Triangle of Need, her most ambitious work to date, integrates everything from figure-skating to prehistoric communication and e-mail scams in a compelling investigation of wealth and poverty.

The story of Triangle of Need unfolds in two main locations: Miami's Vizcaya and a nondescript apartment in "an American city." In these two starkly contrasting sites, Sullivan situates what she calls "vestigial narratives," one involving a wealthy industrialist trying to force the last remaining members of a hominid species to reproduce, and the second, a series of reconstructions of scenes from the catalogue of Pathescope Films, the company from which Deering ordered silent film reels for screening at Vizcaya.

Sullivan always recruits many other creative minds for her projects. For Triangle of Need, she partnered with Minneapolis choreographer Dylan Skybrook to develop specific movements of the imagined species, which were based on Neanderthal man. Sullivan also engaged Minneapolis figure skater Rohene Ward, with whom she designed and filmed a series of spins. Sean Griffin, a Los Angeles-based composer and the artist's frequent collaborator, invented a complex language from theories of Neanderthal speech as well as an original score blends prehistoric flutes, American parlor music and hymns by 17th-century composer Joachim Neander. The valley where Neander composed was given his name and when hominid remains where later found there they were called Neanderthals. 

Catherine Sullivan attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Among the museums which have presented solo exhibitions of her work are Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Renaissance Society, Chicago.  Her work also was included in the Whitney Biennial of 2004.