Kathy Rose
Rose received a Tree of Life Individual Artist Grant in 2015 for Threads of the Half-world.
Biography
Kathy Rose’s work has evolved from her unique, pioneering performance work combining dance with film to her current surreal performance video spectacles, installations, and video pieces, with influence from symbolist art and the Japanese Noh theater.
Rose has received a number of grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Performance Art in 2003 and seven grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has toured extensively in live performance throughout the United States and Europe, and her numerous appearances include the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe, Kennedy Center, Serious Fun at Lincoln Center, Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, the Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, University of Southern California/Visions and Voices series, the Living Arts of Tulsa/New Genres series, Danspace at St. Marks Church, Baltimore Art Museum, Akademie der Kunst/Berlin, Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, as well as performances in Geneva, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and Hiroshima. A program of Rose's videos were shown at the Centre Pompidou on October 2011 in the festival A Shaded View on Fashion and Film, and recently at the Fashion Film Festival/Milan. Her video The Realm of Nothingness was recently awarded best Video/Animation in the EWAAC (East/West Art Awards - London). Other recent shows include Contemporary Venice—It’s LIQUID International Art Show/International experimental video art section under the patronage of the city of Venice, and at Eyebeam Gallery, New York. Rose has shown her videos at numerous dance/video festivals including Dance on Camera/Lincoln Center and American Dance Festival. Her video installations have been shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Aldrich Museum.
Her newest performance, The Opera of the Interior, will premiere in ANIMATOR 2015 in Poznan, Poland in 2015. Rose is a Master Lecturer at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, teaching an interdisciplinary performance art class—Image and Performance, Freshman Performance, The Supernatural in Asian Art and Theater, and Dance and Media. In 2016 she will also co-teach Wearables and Performance at the University
Vimeo Links
Ritual of the Fall, https://vimeo.com/119706050
Cubistimenco, https://vimeo.com/109723728
Rapture of the Petals, https://vimeo.com/109724712
Threads of the Half-world, https://vimeo.com/141846909
In my video works, I combine reality with fantasy to create a new and eerie "irreality," in a kind of personal puppetry, often using my own body and face for these otherworldly constructions. Threads of the Half-world will be a five-minute video depicting the voyage of three women through a surreal environment portraying the mind and the unconscious. It will continue my use and fascination with collage puppetry in video, as used in my recent works, including Rapture of the Petals and Cubistimenco. The three women will be portrayed by former students of mine, Su Rim Kim, Dayoung Han, and Han Bit Kang, all of whom studied performance with me. It continues my special interest in Asian art and performance, and I will place these figures in cavern environments, combining images of caves in Vietnam, with paper structures, which I will manipulate and move, video-taping them in my studio at home. The figures will be inserted using the program Adobe Aftereffects, a compositing program I have used since 2006 for videos and performance work. For some of the environments, I will also use paper cuttings and basket imagery, to give a richer flavor to the backgrounds and puppet costumes. The sound will be created by myself, as I have done with most of my videos. Upgrading my computer and camera is essential to the realization of this project and will enable me to continue to create and exhibit the videos in art and screendance festivals.