Research
Angela Ellsworth
As an interdisciplinary artist, Angela Ellsworth, assistant professor of Intermedia in the ASU Herberger Institute School of Art, examines the body in motion, the body in space and the body in community. Her work explores how our engagement with visual culture can both reflect and challenge our practices of everyday life. Through social art practices, experimental drawing and installation-based performance, Ellsworth explores how the body relates to our cultural, gendered and spatial modes of being in the world. Her art practice strives for moments of consonance where body, mind and culture come together to explore notions of engagement by inviting human experiences into the arena of art practice and inspiring conceptual, political and psychological intersections in a social space.
Examples of engaged bodies activating social spaces are evident in her ongoing project, which started in 2000, Art and Exercise Project. It looks at the seemingly disparate worlds of art and physical activity as they relate to traditional art practices, performativity and intervention. The project began with Club Extra observing the similarities between fitness clubs and art museums as institutions where participants become members, grapple with notions of aesthetic beauty, and gaze at what we want (or wish we had) while trying to achieve profound aesthetic ideals. Ellsworth transforms an art museum into a fitness club inviting museum visitors and the workout community to activate the space.
Drawing on Breath is another solo exhibition in the Art and Exercise Project. In this exhibition, Ellsworth investigates the idea of bodies in motion by creating a performance-based installation with a class of life drawing students, a world-renowned marathon runner, a treadmill and drawing benches. For the duration of two and a half hours the athlete runs a complete marathon on the treadmill in the art gallery while students are continuously making drawings of his moving body. The repetitive movement of the runner parallels the mark-making activities of the artists, challenging the long-standing tradition of life drawing and notions of exercise as performance. The Art and Exercise Project also includes long-distance walking in different landscapes - Arizona, California, Scotland, Iceland, etc. - that inspire multi-layered drawings based on diverse topographies and the repetition of footsteps.