Wear Out

Chelsea Coon

Performance
Duration: 1 hour
2022

This work was performed for "PAB: Performance Art Bergen Open Session"in Bergen, Norway. Curators: Anette Friedrich Johannessen and Mia Øquist

Photographer credit: Petter Lønningen

I held roses under the force of running water for the duration of one hour. This act produced a tension between control and care. In turn, the effect of excessively watering the roses accelerated the time it took for them to die.

My work relates to the theme of "bloom" in relation to the hope that this idea brings along with the potential for beginnings, endings, and possibilities. The performance literally used flowers which had already bloomed, and the action of excessively watering them was meant to illustrate how excessive acts of care can actually harm the flowers. For instance, the excessive watering of the roses in my performance directly correlated to the accelerated time it took for them to die.

Chelsea Coon

Chelsea Coon (b. 1989 United States) is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the shifting interconnections of the body, time, and space. She utilises endurance to reconsider limits of the body through performance, installation, sculpture, painting, photography, video, and text. She has exhibited and performed extensively internationally in festivals,biennales, and galleries in North America, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, and the Middle East.

She received a studio-based, visual arts PhD in performance art and lens-based practice at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2022); MFA at Tufts University with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2014); and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Theatre, Performance and Contemporary Live Arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Scuola Teatro Dimitri, Switzerland (2015).

Her writings have been published in magazines, journals, as well as numerous experimental and academic publications on art, performance, and philosophy. Her monograph No One Thing is the Root of All Anything: Phases and Performance of the Imminent was published with Not a Cult. (Los Angeles, 2018). She is the co-editor of The Phenomenology of Blood in Performance Art! (Taylor and Francis Routledge, 2024 expected).

Chelsea Coon is the recipient of the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grant, Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography, and the Rose Hill Performance Art Award. She lives and works in the United States.

Website: www.chelseacoon.com
Instagram: @all_anything

Facebook: /chelseacoon

Twitter: @all_anything

Vimeo: /chelseacoon

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