Women, Nature, Science: Cecelia Condit: Tales of a Future Past

March 4, 2017 - June 25, 2017

Cecelia Condit - Giraffe and Zebra
Cecelia Condit, Tales of a Future Past (2017), video still.

Opening reception: Saturday, March 4, 2017, 3-5 pm
Free and open to the public.

Bird walk with Cecelia Condit & Chuck Stebelton: Sunday, April 23, 2017, 8:30-10 am
Click here for more information.

Fear and displacement are central to Cecelia Condit's work, which dissects the entanglements that connect self, society, and the natural world. Condit is a storyteller, particularly of psychologically inflected contemporary fairy tales, whose work--like all the best fairy tales--oscillates between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty. Her videos document the frailty of personal identity in the face of the primordial unknown that sits just outside the frame, a charged space loaded with irony and danger.

Condit's exhibition at Lynden reflects her increasing interest in landscape and the natural world. Her most recent two-channel installation, Tales of a Future Past (2017), explores extinction through the story of a lone giraffe who collects small animal forms that evoke treasured memories, hope, innocence, and grief. When an aggressive zebra crosses her path, the giraffe’s fragile world is threatened. In Tales, Condit considers time and space in relation to landscape and our planet, moving from the insistently personal to the universal, and from fairy tale to myth. Also on view will be virtuosic photographs that subvert scale and time to create fictitious landscapes.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews the exhibition here.

About the Artists

Cecelia Condit has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous awards including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists. She is currently a professor in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Renato Umali (composer, Tales of a Future Past) is a graduate of Northwestern University's School of Music, where he studied piano performance and analog and digital synthesis. In 2003, he earned a master's degree in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts. He currently conducts piano lessons at home and at the Brass Bell Music Store, and teaches film courses, including one studying and constructing film scores, for the UWM Film Department.


©2024 Lynden Sculpture Garden