Abigail Child
- 2009-2010
- Visual Arts
- Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize
Abigail Child has been filming in Rome scenes from the life of Mary and Percy Shelley in the form of imaginary home movies, utilizing Fellows as actors and the magnificent light and buildings of Rome as ‘sets’ for a feature film whose working title is The Pursuit.
With her piece for AAR's Cryptoporticus in spring, L’impero Invertito, we find her most site-specific installation so far. Here, Child combines Hollywood invention and historical reenactments with contemporary bodies to create a more ambivalent triumphal march into the capital of Empire.
On location in Rome, 2009
Abigail Child filming her feature The Pursuit,with Fellows Nick Wilding (Shelley) and Eileen Ryan (Mary Shelley) with Zooey Wilding (baby Shelley) and Mary Doyle (Prod. Assistant).
L'Impero Invertito, 2010
Images from the site specific installation for the Cryptoporticus, AAR April 15-May 9, 2010.
Includes from left to right: Titus Adkins, Lydia Reissmueller , Nicholas Brennan, and Turiya Adkins.
Abigail Child is an internationally acclaimed film/video artist. Her original montage pushes the envelope of sound-image relations, exploring gesture as language, and creating radical strategies to rewrite narrative. In the last decade, Child has expanded her vertical montage to multi-screen installation, exhibiting at The Walker Museum and Harvard University among others. Child has had retrospectives nationally and internationally; her art is in the permanent collection of MoMA, NY and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others; and Harvard Film Center has created an “Abigail Child Collection” which will preserve and exhibit her films. Child is also a writer whose poetry collections include A Motive for Mathem and Scatter Matrix as well as the recent collection of critical writings, This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (University of Alabama Press, 2005). Child is senior faculty at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and calls NYC home.