Triangle of Need
Multi-channel video and sound installation
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
- Metro Pictures, New York
- A Foundation, Liverpool
- Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami
- Centre Pompidou, Paris
- Gallerie Nagel, Cologne
- Smart Museum, Chicago
Catherine Sullivan's new multi-channel video installation, Triangle of Need, premied at the Walker Art Center. Triangle of Need was executed in collaboration with Los Angeles composer Sean Griffin, Minneapolis choreographer Dylan Skybrook, and Nigerian director Kunle Afolayan. The work was filmed primarily at Vizcaya and in a nondescript apartment in Chicago, the city in which Vizcaya patron James Deering's International Harvester firm was based. Triangle of Need introduces "Neanderthals," e-mail scams, and figure skating into Vizcaya's lush and seemingly placid environment. The resulting video is at once visually seductive and conceptually alienating, mixing cinematic conventions with difficult and abstract ideas about evolution, human behavior, and social inequality.
Vizcaya provided a relevant backdrop for Sullivan's focus on class and the evolution of wealth in America. But Sullivan also sought to meet the estate's "high standard for the imagination." Explaining how the property was compatible with her approach, the artist noted: "Vizcaya is a place of great historical 'noise,' with a pastiche of styles and decorative chronologies; there is no singular experience of one moment in time. Histories overlap and leave behind loose ends."
Sean Griffin, a Los Angeles–based composer and the artist’s frequent collaborator, invented a complex, performative language called Mousterian taken from theories of Neanderthal speech. For this work, he also created an original score for 11 instruments, combining scientific reconstructions of various sources (prehistoric flutes, early analog electronics) with early 20th-century American parlor music and sacred music by 17th-century composer Joachim Neander, after whom the Neanderthal is named.
Triangle of Need was co-commissioned by Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, A Foundation (Liverpool, UK), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN).
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