BASIC FURNISHINGS FOR UNEQUAL SPACES(2016)

Basic Furnishings for Unequal Spaces by Caroline Doherty

Caroline Doherty employs multiple mediums — including sculpture, performance, writing, video, and public projects — to engage questions of language, communication, violence, and power. It is a process of reduction, translation, and re-animation; it is the distillation of an unmanageable idea into a distinct form or action, which then reflects it back. Keeping in mind the systematized links between fear, power, pleasure, and economics, she endeavors to make work that challenges our current norms in favor of new modes of action. Ultimately, social systems are referenced, questioned, and confounded.

Basic Furnishings for Unequal Spaces is a site-specific installation and performance developed specifically for CEPA’s second floor Passageway Galleries. The minimal installation envisions the Passageway as a series of conceptually linked rooms whose individual purposes are decided by the carefully crafted and familiar objects inside – furniture, flags, megaphones, banners. When activated by performers, these archetypal objects change purpose, dynamics of power shift, and new narratives form.

About Caroline Doherty

Caroline Doherty was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1982. She is an MFA candidate at the University at Buffalo, and earned a BFA in Sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art in 2004. She has exhibited, taught, collaborated, and been a resident artist in the US and abroad, most recently at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Chongjiang Contemporary Art Museum in Chongqing, China, SOMA in Mexico City, ArtPark in Lewiston, NY, and Box Gallery in Buffalo. Alongside her art practice, Caroline has spent the last fifteen years teaching people of many ages and backgrounds how to make and do new things.