Cheryl Donegan: Scenes and Commercials

Working across video, painting, and performance, Cheryl Donegan (b. 1962, New Haven, USA) explores the production and consumption of images in mass culture, middlebrow design, and art history.

In her performance and video work spanning the early ’90s to the early ’00s, Donegan often used her body as an apparatus for mark-making, parodying the conventions of commercials and music videos while considering the politics of self-representation. Over the last decade, she has continued her exploration of the mediated image and her interests in surface, compressed space, and the indexical relation of the mark to the body in paintings and sculptures produced in her studio as well as in videos distributed on social media. Her New Museum residency and exhibition on the Fifth Floor will be presented as part of the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY and will tackle the ways and means by which our connections to the past are produced, fabricated, and renewed, particularly in fashion and art history. Donegan will present works from throughout her career, bringing together key projects that have been generative of new pieces in her oeuvre. She will also premiere EXTRA LAYER, a collection of outerwear produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me, which will be unveiled in a fashion show at the New Museum in early April 2016. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the Resource Center will serve as a concept store that will display garments, drawings, prints, and textiles Donegan has produced alongside items she has sourced from websites such as eBay, engaging in a process of “refashioning the readymade.”

The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, with Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator. The concept store is curated by Burton with O’Keeffe and Alicia Ritson, Research Fellow.